Jonathan Gardner

Jonathan Gardner was born in 1982 in Lexington, Kentucky. He earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2007, then an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010, where he studied under the Chicago Imagist painter Jim Nutt; his CV also lists a Post-Baccalaureate Studio Certificate from the same institution. He lives and works in New York City.

His exhibition record begins with a 2009 appearance at Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago, followed by his first UK solo exhibition at Mary Mary in Glasgow, held from November 2014 to January 2015. His work developed a signature vocabulary of compressed, theatrical interiors and figures rendered with a graphic, almost decorative flatness, populated with still-life props and art-historical echoes. In 2017 he was awarded the Prix Jean-Francois Prat in Paris. His primary gallery representation has been with Casey Kaplan in New York, alongside solo exhibitions with Almine Rech in Paris and London and with Jason Haam in Seoul, where his 2021 exhibition marked his first solo show in Asia. In 2025, MASSIMODECARLO announced joint representation with Casey Kaplan, marking the gallery's first Paris solo presentation, Still Life, at MASSIMODECARLO Piece Unique. His paintings are held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Daegu Art Museum in South Korea.

Coverage of Gardner's work has appeared in art press tied to his gallery exhibitions, though specific outlet citations were not independently verified for this profile. Across gallery and museum texts, the recurring critical description centers on his flattened pictorial space and his synthesis of still life, portraiture, and landscape into scenes that read as both familiar and invented, built from personal memory and collective visual culture. No verbatim critical quotation from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is reproduced here.

Gardner's secondary market is young and thin relative to his gallery profile, and the record is fragmented across sources. The most fully documented result is Desert Wind, a 2018 oil-on-linen painting that sold for HKD 1,032,000 (about USD 132,000) at Phillips in Hong Kong, against an estimate of HKD 850,000 to 1,500,000; the exact sale date is not published in the sources reviewed. Other reported figures are less complete: MutualArt cites a top realized price of about USD 419,732 without naming the work, house, or date, and Artsy separately lists a 2026 sale of a work titled Flora for USD 168,000, in what its sale code suggests was a London auction, while Phillips also lists a work titled Daisy that sold for USD 125,000 against an estimate of USD 20,000 to 30,000. Artprice ranked him 3,114th among the top 5,000 best-selling artists by auction turnover in the 2025 sale year, noting that his best sales that year took place in Hong Kong.

Gardner is a living artist with current gallery representation through Casey Kaplan and MASSIMODECARLO, and a record of solo exhibitions across New York, Paris, London, and Seoul, alongside museum placements at LACMA and the Daegu Art Museum, both signals of institutional durability. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and authentication run through his representing galleries. His auction history remains limited in volume, concentrated in recent years, and reported inconsistently across databases, so any single result should be read as an early data point rather than a stable long-run benchmark.