Jonas Wood

Jonas Wood was born in Boston in 1977 and grew up around his grandfather's art collection, which included work by Francis Bacon, Alexander Calder, and Andy Warhol, an early exposure he has cited as formative. He earned a BA from Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York, in 1999, majoring in psychology with a studio art minor, then moved to Seattle for an MFA in painting and drawing at the University of Washington, completed in 2002.

After graduate school, Wood relocated to Los Angeles, where he worked for painter Laura Owens before committing fully to his own studio practice. He shares a studio with his wife, the ceramicist Shio Kusaka, whose vessels frequently appear as subjects in his paintings. His work is built from photographs and collage source material rather than direct observation, assembled into interiors, portraits, and still lifes rendered in flat planes of pattern and color.

Wood's first solo museum exhibition came in 2010 at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, which led to major public commissions including a mural on New York's High Line and facade projects for LAXART and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. He has since had solo exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art and, jointly with Kusaka, at Museum Voorlinden in the Netherlands. Phaidon published a comprehensive monograph on his work in 2019. He continues to live and work in Los Angeles, showing internationally through David Kordansky Gallery and Gagosian, which mounted his tenth exhibition with the gallery, and its first in Los Angeles, in early 2026.

Critics have generally read Wood's work through the lens of a distinctly Los Angeles strain of figuration that treats domestic and personal subject matter with formal rigor rather than sentimentality. His use of flattened space, decorative pattern, and repeated motifs, potted plants, basketballs, his own collection of art and ceramics, has drawn comparisons to Henri Matisse and David Hockney, artists concerned with interior life rendered through pattern and color rather than illusionistic depth. The critical throughline is that Wood's subjects are autobiographical without being confessional: a painting of a shelf of pots or a tennis court functions as a kind of inventory of what the artist looks at and collects. Museum programming, at the Hammer, the Dallas Museum of Art, and Museum Voorlinden, has reinforced his standing as a mid-career figurative painter with sustained institutional interest rather than a market-driven flash.

Wood's auction high is Two Tables with Floral Pattern, a 2013 oil and acrylic canvas that sold for USD 6,510,000 against a USD 2 million to 4 million estimate at Christie's New York on 11 May 2021, in the house's 21st Century Evening Sale. The result has held as his record through mid-2026. His prints have also developed an active secondary market; a set from his Four Majors series set a print-specific record at Phillips in January 2025, though that result remains well below the painting record.

Wood's market has been comparatively orderly for a painter of his generation: a small number of galleries have controlled primary supply since 2011, and his auction record has stood since 2021 even as secondary volume has grown. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and studio confirmation carry extra weight, particularly given the volume of prints and editioned works now in circulation alongside unique paintings. For a collector, the print market is a useful, lower-cost gauge of demand, but it moves on a different track from his unique paintings and should not be read as a proxy for where the top of his market sits.