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Jonas Wood is known for body coloured graphic works which combine art historical references with the personal imagery – objects, interiors, and people – of his life. A child of an artistic family, Wood grew up in Boston, where he spent significant periods of his young life surrounded by the collection of his grandfather. This featured works by such artists as Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, Jim Dine, Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers, and Andy Warhol. He credits them with a profound influence on his practise, suggesting that he has repeatedly appropriated their visual language in order to translate the three-dimensional world around him.
Ultimately, this is Wood’s greatest inspiration. He refuses to engage with arbitrary subject matter he has no relationship to. He says: ‘You could call [my work] a visual diary or even a personal history. I’m not going to paint something that doesn’t have anything to do with me. Of all of the possible things I could paint, the thing that interests me is something that I can get close enough to in order to paint it honestly.’ As such, his is an oeuvre which is primarily concerned with reflecting an instantly recognisable vision of the contemporary world through deeper, more personal symbolism.
This print, speaks to this tendency. Formatted to the proportion of a classic Polaroid picture, it is part of a series featuring a different plant removed from a distinct background and context, like a scientific extraction. Having long been a source of fascination for Wood, plants have come to occupy a position of importance in his work. This, the artists first depiction of a banana tree was inspired by the tropical fauna Wood encountered during a visit to Hawaii.
Wood’s work is in the permanent collections of many institutions, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Broad, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
