Jonathan Lasker

Jonathan Lasker was born in 1948 in Jersey City, New Jersey. Some accounts note early studies at Queens College in New York before he turned toward painting, though this detail is not corroborated across multiple sources. He began night courses at the School of Visual Arts in New York in 1975 and continued there until 1977, then spent the spring and fall semesters of 1977 at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. An MFA from CalArts is cited in some brief biographies, though the exact year is not documented and the degree does not appear in his gallery curricula vitae.

By the mid-1980s Lasker had developed the approach that defines his work: large paintings built from a repertoire of biomorphic blobs, grid-like or geometric fields, and dense, calligraphic drawing, each rendered in a distinct register and combined on one surface. He had an early museum solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, in 1992. A major traveling retrospective, "Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 1977 to 1997," moved through the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Kunstverein St. Gallen in 1997 and 1998, and a further retrospective was held in 2003 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Dusseldorf. He was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in New York in 2015. He continues to live and work in New York, with a solo exhibition of drawings and studies on view at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle from October 2025 through September 2026.

Lasker's work has been read since the late 1980s as a deliberate, almost diagrammatic dissection of abstract painting's own vocabulary. Critics and curators have consistently placed him among the painters, working in New York in the late 1980s and early 1990s, who treated abstraction as a self-conscious, near-conceptual language rather than an expressive one, a framing reinforced by his inclusion in successive museum retrospectives in Europe and the United States.

Lasker's auction market is modest in scale relative to his museum standing. The best fully documented result is an Untitled painting that sold for USD 252,000 at Sotheby's New York on September 29, 2022, described by Artnet at the time as the third-highest auction result then on record for the artist. The same market report referenced an unconfirmed higher figure of about USD 350,000 from roughly 2020, but did not identify the work, venue, or exact date, so that figure cannot be verified here. More recent sales illustrate the range of his market: the painting "Love becoming Power" made EUR 78,120 including premium at Lempertz in Cologne in December 2025, while other works have sold in the tens of thousands of dollars at smaller regional houses.

There is no published catalogue raisonne for Lasker, so provenance and verification through his representing galleries, principally Greene Naftali in New York and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris and Salzburg, carry added weight. His auction results vary widely by venue, from six-figure sales at major London and New York houses to far more modest prices at smaller regional auction houses, which means the sale venue matters as much as the work itself when assessing a given result. His museum presence, spanning MoMA, the Whitney, LACMA, the Centre Pompidou, the National Gallery of Art, the Reina Sofia, and Museum Ludwig, remains the strongest evidence of long-term institutional durability, even where the auction record is comparatively sparse.