JONATHAN LASKER
OPENING THURSDAY 21 AUGUST, 5–7 PM
THROUGH 21 SEPTEMBER 2025
Heavyhanded, blunt, puzzling – these were the words that spontaneously came to mind when I first encountered Jonathan Lasker’s paintings. His works are oddly spellbinding– they have a primal sort of wit. At first glance, the viewer sees little more than a contextless mass of diverse pictorial techniques. Like pieces out of a building block set, black lines, flat and sign-like, are set schematically next to opaque-pastose bulges of color, straight from tube to canvas. Ponderous, painstakingly painted strokes and squiggles spread across a monochromatic background, covered by fat, immovable splotches of color. Not a trace of fleetingness, every shape in the picture sits in its proper spot and yet, none seem to fit quite right.
The viewer gets the feeling of knowing the elements in the picture without being able to truly identify them. This ambivalence is a systematic one: the components in Lasker’s compositions are recurrent of various styles of Modernism. In these paintings, with the artist as a postmodern director, they come together as gaily disguised actors in a colorful, almost dramatic comedy. Stylistic antagonists from abstract painting now seem to be communicating in a controlled, gestural ensemble. Worth noting are the positions of the ‘New York School’ with its Abstract Expressionism, Minimal Art as well as Pop Art – themselves already reactions to the elitist expectations of Classic Modernism. Here and there, elements of Op Art are included. References to artists like Ad Reinhardt, Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock or Franz Kline are repeatedly found in Lasker’s paintings. In order to elaborate on Lasker’s specific approach and visual language as a postmodern position, we need to examine the socio-political context of Modernism and the aesthetic values and ideals that it has brought to visual art, in order to reconstruct the problems and challenges of the so-called post-modern generation. Lasker’s style of working will be specifically examined in the context of the work “Hidden Identity.”
Text by Agara Schymocha
Introduction from the Essay "Postmodern Painting in the Mirror of Modernism. How Jonathan Lasker reflects the legacy of Modern Abstraction"
Numinous Importance, 2025, Oil on linen, 150 x 200 cm, Photo Max Geuter
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