Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Jonathan Lyndon Chase, who uses they/them pronouns, was born in 1989 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and continues to live and work in the city, with a studio in the Kensington neighborhood. After a high school summer painting program at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Chase earned an Associate of Arts from the Community College of Philadelphia in 2010, a BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia in 2013, and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2016.

Chase's practice spans painting, drawing, sculpture, video, sound, collage, photography, and poetry, and centers on queer Black bodies and domestic, often bedroom-scale, interiors rendered with a rough, layered materiality. An early solo show, Sweet and Hard, opened at Thierry Goldberg Gallery in New York in 2016. A relationship with Company Gallery in New York followed, including the solo exhibitions Quiet Storm and Sheets in 2018, the same year Chase held a residency with the Rubell Family Collection Contemporary Arts Foundation in Miami. In 2019, Chase received the Pew Fellowship in the Arts and opened solo exhibitions that year at both Company Gallery and Kohn Gallery in Los Angeles, extending gallery representation to the West Coast.

Institutional recognition expanded through the early 2020s. The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia presented the solo museum exhibition Big Wash from 2020 to 2021, and Chase received the Joan Mitchell Fellowship in 2022. Chase's gallery representation broadened internationally with Sadie Coles HQ in London, where the solo exhibitions Now I'm Home, Lips That Know My Name (2023) and Downpour (2025) were staged, alongside the institutional solo his beard is soft, my hands are empty at Artists Space in New York in 2023. In January 2026, Chase opened Keep Thinking Nobody Does It Like You Here Comes the Sunset at Gio Marconi in Milan, described by the gallery as Chase's first exhibition in Italy and first show with that gallery.

Coverage of Chase's work has emphasized how rough, layered materials, sheets, denim, sanded and stitched surfaces, carry the emotional and social weight of the paintings rather than serving as formal effects, with recurring attention to queer Black love, intimacy, and community depicted within bedroom-scale domestic settings. Trebuchet Magazine, previewing Chase's 2026 Milan exhibition, framed the artist's rapid institutional rise as itself worth interrogating. The critical throughline is a reading of domestic and bodily intimacy as a site where queerness and Blackness are represented without being explained or softened for an outside viewer.

Chase's clearest, fully dated auction result is Hacate, a 2017 mixed-media painting that sold for HKD 687,500 (about USD 88,100 at then-prevailing rates) against a HKD 40,000 to 55,000 estimate at Phillips Hong Kong's day sale on 25 November 2019. A confirmed Phillips New York day sale result for the painting Clothes Shopping, USD 50,000 on 2 July 2020, further illustrates Chase's early secondary-market activity. A separate, undated entry on Phillips's artist overview page lists a higher figure, USD 105,840, for a painting titled Bend against a USD 35,000 to 45,000 estimate; no confirmed sale date could be located for that lot, and it is not certain whether it reflects an auction sale or another type of transaction, so it is noted here rather than presented as the record. The same overview page lists additional undated results, including Man in Dark at USD 88,200 and Day Dreaming at GBP 30,240 (about USD 41,700). Artsy has separately described the artist's work as selling in the six-figure range on the secondary market, consistent with these figures. Collectors should treat Chase's auction record as still forming, with Hacate the most defensibly documented high to date.

Chase has no catalogue raisonne, and authentication runs through the artist's representing galleries, Company Gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, and Kohn Gallery, rather than a foundation or estate archive. The auction record is genuinely unsettled: only a small number of public sales have surfaced, currencies and estimates vary widely between them, and the highest-value result identified in research lacks a confirmed date, so any single price point should be read with caution rather than as a stable benchmark. What is comparatively firm is the institutional picture: Chase's work already sits in the Whitney Museum, Walker Art Center, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, and representation has expanded from Philadelphia and New York galleries to Los Angeles, London, and, as of 2026, Milan, the last relationship still developing. For a collector, that museum trajectory is the more reliable signal at this stage of the market than any individual auction result.