Jonathan Lasker

Jonathan Lasker (born 1948) is an American abstract painter whose work has played an integral role in the development of Postmodern Painting.[1][2] He currently lives and works in New York City.[3]

Jonathan Lasker
Jonathan Lasker in his New York studio in 2007.
Born1948 (1948)
Jersey City, New Jersey
NationalityAmerican
EducationSchool of Visual Arts, California Institute of the Arts
Known forPainting
MovementContemporary Art, Abstract Art

Lasker has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grants in 1987 and again in 1989.[4][5] In 1989 he was also awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Grant.[6]His work has been covered in Artforum[7], Artscribe[8], Arts Magazine[9], Flash Art[10], New Art Examiner[11], New York Magazine[12], The New York Times[13], Tema Celeste[14], Village Voice[15], Bomb Magazine[16], and The Washington Post[17] among others.[18] He was the subject of the 2005 book Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things by Richard Milazzo which documented his process of developing abstract compositions from sketches to paintings.[19]

Early life and education

Lasker was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, and attended the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York City as well as the California Institute of the Arts[20] in Valencia, California.[21] He spent his teenage years reading widely, with a special interest in the Beat poets and in such early modern playwrights as August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw, and Eugene O’Neill.[22]

Originally aspiring to become a musician, Lasker left New York after studying at Queens College and played bass guitar and blues harmonica in bands in the US and Europe. In 1975, after resettling in New York, he began taking night courses at the SVA, where he turned his attention to paintings and collages inspired by the indexical work of Robert Rauschenberg. He continued studying at SVA until 1977, when he transferred to the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in Valencia, California.[23]

Lasker spent the spring and fall semesters of 1977 at CalArts, a period of study that was short but formative. As a painter, he was challenged by the prevailing Conceptualist position at the school, which was critical of painting for what was viewed as its acceptance of received modes of expression. While some of his professors were openly opposed to painting, two guest instructors whose time at CalArts coincided with Lasker’s — the New Image painter Susan Rothenberg and the Pop/Minimalist artist Richard Artschwager — offered insights into overcoming the critical impasse imposed upon contemporary painting by formalist theory.[24]

Lasker discussed this period in an interview with the artist Amy Bernstein:

At CalArts, to be a painter meant you had to take a stance, because there was a very antagonistic attitude towards painting there. In a way it was good for me, because it forced me to shape my reasons for making paintings. It also forced me to make paintings that had reasons for being paintings. So I think, in a way it pushed me in a good direction, although the experience was alienating.[25]

The ideas that Lasker adopted at this early stage in his career brought an analytical approach to the supposedly outmoded practice of making a painting by hand. Lasker’s solution was to create a recurring vocabulary of motifs of texture, shape, color, and line that he would arrange and rearrange from painting to painting, as if they were a cast of characters entering and exiting a stage.[26]

In “Image Kit,” an essay the artist wrote in 1986 and later revised for a book of his complete essays published in 1998, he describes the distancing and self-consciousness on the part of both the artist and viewer that is fundamental to his work:

I often think of my paintings as a form of image kit or perhaps as jigsaw puzzles, which offer components of painting as clues pointing the viewer, not to a finished narrative (as when the last piece of the jigsaw puzzle completes a picture of Notre Dame), but rather to a self-awareness of how one construes a painting.[27]

The art historian and curator Robert Hobbs refers to the kind of painting practiced by Lasker and such peers as Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, and David Reed as meta-abstraction.[28] He has also been called a Conceptual painter.[29]

Early career (1978–1984)

In October 1977, two months before he left CalArts, Lasker painted “Illinois,” which he considers his breakthrough work. The painting takes its name from a white abstract shape in the lower left-hand corner of the canvas, which resembles the map of the titular state. The importance he places on the painting derives from his realization that the elements constituting the work — the scumbled, grayish green field; the shapes painted in solid black or solid white; and the off-register black brushstrokes delineating the white shapes and separating them from the field — could function outside the traditional figure/ground relationship. As he stated in a conversation with Hobbs, “It struck me that there was a role reversal of figure to ground, in that the assertiveness of the ground challenged the figure for dominance.[30]”

After leaving CalArts at the end of 1977, Lasker spent two years living and working in San Francisco, California, where he saw retrospectives of the painters Philip Guston and Jasper Johns at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He also spent time studying the thickly textured Abstract Expressionist canvases of Clyfford Still in the museum’s permanent collection, as well the painting House of Cards (1960) by Al Held, which is filled with brightly colored and broadly outlined geometric shapes.[31]

In August 1979, Lasker moved back to New York, where he lived on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village.[32] Within a year, in June 1980. Landmark Gallery in Soho offered him his first solo show, which opened in January 1981. One of the people who saw that show was the art dealer Tony Shafrazi, who invited Lasker to participate in his own gallery’s debut group exhibition on Mercer Street in Soho. Also included in the show were the artists Keith Haring, Donald Baechler, and Ronnie Cutrone.[33]

Also in 1981, Lasker had his first exhibition in Europe, at Galerie Gunnar Kaldewey, in Düsseldorf, Germany, where his work was noticed by the art dealer David Nolan, who was then working with Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne.[34] Over the next several years Lasker showed his paintings at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in midtown Manhattan.[35] In the 1984 exhibition, Fact and Fiction, his work was hung alongside that of Thomas Nozkowski and Gary Stephan, two artists with whom Lasker was having extensive discussions about abstract painting. He had a solo show at Tibor de Nagy that year and again in 1986.[36]

Development (1984 – present)

In 1984 Lasker was introduced to the curators Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo (known as Collins & Milazzo),[37] who were among the most influential tastemakers of the time and catalysts in what the curator Dan Cameron called “the late-’80s neo-Conceptual takeover of the East Village.”[38]

Collins & Milazzo included Lasker’s work in three[39] of the four exhibitions they organized in New York in 1985: Final Love at C.A.S.H./Newhouse Gallery; Paravision at Postmasters Gallery; and Cult and Decorum at Tibor De Nagy Gallery. These shows placed Lasker in a contemporary context that included such artists as Ross Bleckner, Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, and Robert Gober, among others — an association that was affirmed by museum shows over the course of the next decade.[40]

That same year, Michael Werner invited the artist to Cologne to make paintings for a solo exhibition at his gallery there,[41] which opened in 1986.[42] While working in a former horse stable at Schloss Loersfeld in the countryside near Cologne,[43]Lasker developed the working method he has followed ever since. He begins by drawing on small pads of paper, choosing several sketches for further development. He then makes small versions of the selected images in oil paint on paper, putting those compositions through several variations. From these images he creates large, finished paintings, transferring the elements of the studies freehand to the canvas.[44] “Above all for me, it’s not the act of painting that’s important, it’s the picture. The studies are a means of perfecting composition.”[45]

Writing in 1985, the critic and philosopher David Carrier summed up Lasker’s practice in the following way:

Pressed to indicate in a phrase what was unique about Jonathan Lasker’s art, I would say that he shows how purely abstract painting may be composed in layers to create a satisfying tension between surface and depth. Count forward from the rear of his space: (1) the deep background, a field of stripes or other allover decorative surface; (2) several object shapes placed before that background; (3) heavy, usually black, drawing on or in front of those objects. Modernists flattened the picture space so that even depicted forms (Klee, Dubuffet, Diebenkorn in his representational period) inhabit a place too shallow to contain more than the outlines of those figures. Lasker moves in the reverse direction. Because his space contains plenty of open room, he can place in a picture a whole array of nonrepresentational forms.[46]

The artist views the densely painted autonomous shapes in his compositions as "things of paint", a term that consciously recalls the Minimalist concept of "specific objects",[47] a term that is also the title of the seminal 1965 essay by Donald Judd advocating the "use of three dimensions",[48] in new art, often incorporating industrial materials. From Judd’s perspective, such materials, unlike traditional paint and canvas, are “not diluted by an inherited format, variations of a form, mild contrasts and connecting parts and areas”[49]; nor are the elements of specific objects “subordinate to the unity”[50] of a delimiting entity, such as a painting’s rectangular canvas support.

In response, Lasker has proposed a critical rethinking of “specific objects" so that they "could be re-applied to the objects in a picture".[51] Rather than harmonize his elements in the interest of compositional unity, he endeavored to “make the paintings dialectical and to have them be conflicted images which would create a dialogue.” By aggressively using paint-as-paint — whose patterns, colors, textures, and facture often seem in pointed opposition to one another — Lasker is paying close attention to, as Judd put it, “the obdurate identity of a material.”[52]

Despite his practice’s analytical approach to painting and his critique of Minimalism, Lasker does not see himself as a painter who works to prescribed theories. As he explained in an interview with the poet and critic John Yau: "There’s a theoretical notion of how to create an artwork, and there was no prescribed theory for these paintings as I developed them."[53]

Writing and use of language

Lasker has written a number of essays on art, artists, and other topics. In 1998 he compiled his texts, many of them short and epigrammatic, in Complete Essays 1984-1998, published by Edgewise in 1998.[54] It includes “Image Kit” (1986/1998)[55]; “After Abstraction” (1986), which was written as a catalogue essay for the group exhibition What It Is at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery[56]; “Abstraction, Past Itself” (1987), from the catalogue for the 40th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC[57]; and “The Subjects of the Abstract” (1995)[58], written for the catalogue of the group exhibition Transatlantica: The America Europa Non-Representiva at the Museo Alejandro Otero in Caracas, Venezuela.[59]

These essays, among others, dwell on the nature of painting and often double as artists’ statements[60]. The book also contains essays on the artists Eugene Leroy and Willem de Kooning, as well as observations on such subjects as life in New York’s East Village and horse racing at Aqueduct Racetrack.[61]

The artist also sees the titling of his paintings as a form of writing. "The titles are really my one-line shot at being a poet."[62] He does not attempt to manipulate the viewer’s interpretation of the work, but instead seeks language that reflects the ambiguity of his images, although he occasionally refers to the process of making the painting, as in Beat the System (1985) and Sensible Arrangement (1995).[63]

Aside from titling paintings, there is a critical dialogue related to semiotics taking place in his work. As he has noted, "over the years, as [the] subject of language [in my paintings] has been introduced and reintroduced by others, I am sure it has influenced my own thinking about the work, and I have approached my painting a bit more from a language point of view." However, "the big issue was not originally, specifically language, but the idea that there would be conflict and argument within the picture."[64]

Critical reception

In 1981, Douglas Welch wrote the first article published on Lasker, a one-page essay in the January issue of Arts Magazine, in anticipation of the artist’s debut solo exhibition opening that month at the Landmark Gallery.[65]

The first critical study of the artist was David Carrier’s “Painting into Depth: Jonathan Lasker’s Recent Art”, published in the January 1985 issue of Arts, and the question of Lasker’s content was already a topic of debate saying, "Some abstract paintings look portrait-like, while many others are landscapes of the mind; Lasker’s suggest, rather, a man-made space, a proscenium in which his shapes and drawings are to be placed."[66]

Five years later, the art historian and critic Joseph Masheck also makes a different connection to theater in “Painting in Double Negative: Jonathan Lasker”, in which he rejects facile associations with the concepts of simulacra and simulation, or, as he put it, “the cult of Baudrillard,”[67] and instead projects Lasker’s painting through the lens of Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double (1938):

It cannot have escaped Lasker that his own work, however, smart, is much less simplistic and shows rather less 'attitude' than fashion dictates. He seems to paint out of suave disgust for the pseudo-radical philistines’ antipathy toward painting. Thus I see his work not as an empty, ill-defined 'double' for painting, that is, as part of the current bourgeois anti-art voodoo, but as a true treble to that false double.[68]

The critic Barry Schwabsky, in his reading of Lasker’s work, adds another layer of complexity, that of an ambiguous relationship to metaphor within the artist’s central focus on paint-as-paint. In a review of a solo exhibition at the Rose Museum of Brandeis University, he writes:

Jonathan Lasker once told me he thought the Minimalists had been trying to make an art without metaphor, and in fact had succeeded; but the point having been proved, he continued, there’s no longer an urgent motivation to produce more metaphor-free work. But neither, I would add, is there any special reason to create metaphor-laden art—that is, unless the metaphors carry conviction. Lasker’s paintings puzzle over precisely this question: what’s credible in painting, for now, and why.[69]

Art Critic Demetrio Paparoni addresses the subject of Lasker and metaphor in the essay "An Abstract Logo for Democracy in Art":

In contrast to Mondrian, [Lasker] does not desire the painting to be an object in itself and, in order to leave space for metaphor, confers subjective value on color. Most importantly, he considers the creative thought process behind the work and the sentiment that animates his formal choices of equivalent import.[70]

The critic and historian Robert Hughes posted a review on Artslant of Lasker’s solo exhibition at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, in which he rejects the idea that the artist’s work is about anything other than its formal properties:

Lasker explores the inflections, the innuendoes of hues and geometric forms that represent themselves rather than convey meaning for representing something else. These are works that simply ask us to see. By reducing (or, perhaps, ennobling) a form to its basics – a gray rectangle, perhaps, that glows on a graph grid – then placing beside it a similar but altered shape whose bold colors give it recrudescent life, Lasker wants us to look at what we ignore, or to imagine what we suppress. These are joyous, reasoned, passionate works. They trace moods through something indecipherable – they are, after all, abstractions – but Lasker has a way of anchoring us to them. Sight made tactile, thought made figurative.[71]

Collections

Lasker's work is included in numerous private and public collections around the world. Museums that have Lasker's work in their collections include:

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References

Notes

  1. Paparoni, Demetrio (2002), Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 1977-2001 (in Italian and English), Milano, Italia: Alberico Cetti Serbelloni Editore, p. 23, ISBN 88-88098-062, Elsewhere I have referred to 80s art as redefined abstraction in order to emphasize that the greatness of artists such as Lasker, Bleckner, Halley, Taaffe, Reed (those that is, from the generation of artists succeeding Ryman, Marden, Scully) lay chiefly in their attempts to redefine that canons of art without recognizable images, the art that from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 50s carved a path for itself by opposing figuration and its codes or reading or interpretation.
  2. "Richard Millazo Art Books". richardmilazzo.com. Richard Milazzo. Retrieved March 15, 2018. Jonathan Lasker is generally considered to be one of the most important artists to emerge from the 1980s. His work has been critical to the development of American abstract painting over the course of nearly two decades.
  3. "Artnet - Jonathan Lasker". artnet.com. Artnet. Retrieved March 15, 2018. Jonathan Lasker is an American abstract painter best known for his works incorporating biomorphic shapes, geometric patterns, and gestural graffiti marks within a shared pictorial space. Lasker works within the traditions of artists such as Philip Guston and Robert Ryman, focusing his efforts on reimagining pictorial ideas within the material constraints of painting. “My goal is to bring the viewer to the threshold of narrativity without crossing over,” the artist has explained, “to bring the viewer to the state of pure pictorially.” Born in 1948 in Jersey City, NJ, Lasker attended the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York before studying at the California Institute of Arts, where he received his MFA. Lasker’s works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Contemporary Art, the Musée National d’Art Moderne Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the High Art Museum in Atlanta, among others. In addition to his studio practice, Lasker has written extensively on abstraction and painting, notably including a collection of essays, Complete Essays 1984 – 1998, published in 1998. He lives and works in New York, NY.
  4. "1989 NEA Grant Report" (PDF). arts.gov. National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved March 15, 2018. Lasker, Jonathan - New York, NY $15,000
  5. "1987 NEA Grant Report" (PDF). arts.gov. National Endowment for the Arts. Retrieved March 15, 2018. Lasker, Jonathan - New York, NY $5,000
  6. "NYFA 1985-2013 Fellows" (PDF). nyfa.org. New York Foundation for the Arts. Retrieved March 15, 2018. 1989 Painting - Jonathan Lasker
  7. "Interviews: Jonathan Lasker". artforum.com. Artforum. December 14, 2011. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  8. Collings, Matthew (September 1987), "Posthumous Meaning: Tricia Collins and Richard Milazzo Interviewed", Artscribe: 49
  9. Cameron, Dan (February 1985), "The Groundhog Report", Arts: 96
  10. Bonami, Francesco (May 1994), "Meaning Can Happen: An Interview with Jonathan Lasker", Flash Art: 95
  11. Rushing, W. Jackson (March 2000), "Reviews: Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity at Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis", New Art Examiner: 57
  12. Newhall, Edith (September 23, 1991), "Fall Preview", New York Magazine: 62
  13. Smith, Roberta (April 27, 2007), "Art in Review; Jonathan Lasker", The New York Times, pp. E28, retrieved March 16, 2018
  14. Paparoni, Demetrio (Autumn 1991), "Interview with Jonathan Lasker", Tema Celeste Art Magazine, 32: 89
  15. Saltz, Jerry (September 7, 1999). "Hungry Hearts". villagevoice.com. Village Voice. An uneven array of painters will be on view, among them John Currin, Carroll Dunham, Jonathan Lasker, Nicola Tyson, Lari Pittman, Lily van der Stokker, Elliott Puckett, Thomas Scheibitz, Diana Cooper, Pet Sourin-thone, Paul Laffoly, John Wesley, David Reed, Frank Stella, and finally the exuberantly Hartley-esque David Bates, about whom Gary Indiana wrote one of the funniest, cruelest, and most unforgettable lines of art criticism, in his Voice review of the 1987 Whitney Biennial: “David Bates? Who the fuck is David Bates?
  16. "Jonathan Lasker by Shirley Kaneda". bombmagazine.com. Bomb. Jan 1, 1990. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  17. Dawson, Jessica (April 19, 2001). "From Stephen Ellis, The Grid Unlocked". washingpost.com. The Washington Post. Retrieved March 16, 2018. In the late '80s and early '90s, a group of New York painters set to work finding out. They revered the grid as much as Mondrian did -- even as they toyed with it like Silly Putty: Among them count Peter Halley, who broke the grid into blocks he called cells and conduits; and Jonathan Lasker, who sullied all the geometric cleanliness. And then there was Stephen Ellis. He agitated the grid.
  18. "Jonathan Lasker CV" (PDF). cheimread.com. Cheim and Read Gallery. Retrieved March 15, 2018.
  19. "Richard Millazo Art Books". richardmilazzo.com. Richard Milazzo. Retrieved March 15, 2018. Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things by Richard Milazzo is the first book to analyze the role of the sketch in the artist’s work. Preliminary even to the small studies, the sketches are the stage in which Jonathan Lasker works out his initial ideas for a painting. Even before making the study or studies that precede the painting, the artist sketches out the most rudimentary of forms and colors, often making the most radical of changes in the process of arriving at the image that will become the final painting.
  20. "CalArts Donor Honor Roll". issu.com. CalArts. January 1, 2014. p. 9. Retrieved March 15, 2018. Jonathan Lasker (77)
  21. "JONATHAN LASKER". cheimread.com. Cheim and Read Gallery. Retrieved March 15, 2018. Jonathan Lasker was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, 1948 and currently lives and works in New York City. He studied at the SVA, New York (1975-77) and California Institute of the Arts, Valencia (1977)
  22. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 11, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, "As a teenager, he read widely and intensely. Among his favorites were the Beat poets and the plays of Eugene O’Neill, George Bernard Shaw, and August Strindberg.
  23. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 3, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, After attending Queens College for less than a year in the late 1960s and taking off several years to play bass guitar and blues harmonica in rock bands in the U.S. and Europe, Lasker returned to New York and enrolled in night courses at the SVA from 1975-77. Toward the end of his schooling there, he took courses with minimalist David Smythe and made collages inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s literalist work that focused on finding equivalents for art’s customary representational functions, such as paint swatches for color, pictures of athletics for art’s dynamics, words and news items for its traditional content, etc. From other SVA students, he learned of the excellent program in studio art at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia (CalArts), and so he applied and was accepted there...
  24. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 3, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, "Lasker referred to [CalArts faculty member and conceptual artist Michael Asher as ‘the grand inquisitor against painting’ [although] two prominent guest instructors [were] more open to traditional painting. The first was New Image painter Susan Rothenberg. The second was Pop artist Richard Artschwager [and both of them] encouraged Lasker to continue the move beyond Greenbergian formalism he had already begun in New York when he was focusing on Rauschenberg’s work.”
  25. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 3, ASIN B004526GWA
  26. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 12, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, "Strindberg’s Ghost Sonata opposes youth with old age, innocence with guilt, horror with beau-ty, redemption with sin, ghosts with life, and death with love, so that its characters, as the Strindberg specialist Eszter Szalczer perceptively notes, ‘are shown as dynamic sets of rela-tions as opposed to singular identities,’ thus functioning in an equivalent capacity to Lasker’s cast of painterly signs in his works”
  27. Lasker, Jonathan (1998), Jonathan Lasker, 1984-1998, New York, Paris, Turin: Edgewise Press, p. 19, ISBN 0-9646466-5-X
  28. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 2, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, "Although the Italian semiotician Umberto Eco regards abstract art categorically as ‘a-semantic,’ Lasker’s figuratively abstract paintings, with their pointedly constructed painterly references, mirror a range of artistic approaches, making his work a special hybrid of a more general and contemporaneous meta-abstract style with definite semantic references.””
  29. Paparoni, Demetrio (2002), Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 1977-2001 (in Italian and English), Milano, Italia: Alberico Cetti Serbelloni Editore, p. 19, ISBN 88-88098-062, Lasker is, at once, both an abstract and a conceptual painter.
  30. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 8, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, In 1977 I painted Illinois; it was a break-through [sic] work. The name came through as-sociating the shape in the lower-left with the shape of the state of Illinois as it appears on a map. It started by scumbling grayish green paint onto blue. I was, at that time, doing drawings of biomorphic shapes on newsprint paper. One day I took the shapes from the newsprint paper drawings and began putting them on my scumbled background. When I realized that the resonance between the foreground figures and scumbled background was not sufficient, I began to draw black elements—drawn lines off-register with the edges of the shapes—to resonate with the forms and the background. What struck me about these paintings was the process of going from positive, colored patterned back-grounds to negative white figures in the foreground. It struck me that there was a role reversal of figure to ground, in that the assertiveness of the ground challenged the figure for dominance.
  31. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 63, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, Lives and paints in San Francisco. Significant exhibitions at S.F. MoMA during this time are Phillip Guston and Jasper Johns retrospectives.Spends significant time viewing Clyfford Stills’ room at S.F. MoMA and also Al Held paining House of Cards—is impressed by how it breaks down into language.
  32. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 63, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, Returns to hometown New York in August ’79—moves into tenement apartment at 11 St. Mark’s Place.
  33. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 63, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, 1980 In June is offered first solo exhibition by Landmark Gallery, 1981 Exhibition opens at Landmark Gallery in January, Meets Tony Shafrazi who is enthused about Landmark exhibition and includes several works in the opening group show of his gallery on Mercer Street—the other artists in the show are Keith Haring, Donald Baechler, and Ronny Cutrone.
  34. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 64, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, Has first European exhibition at Galerie Gunnar Kaldewey, Düsseldorf, Germany—at this time he meets David Nolan of Galerie Michael Werner in Cologne, who recommends his work to Werner.
  35. Lasker, Jonathan (2011), Jonathan Lasker:The 80s, London, UK: Timothy Taylor Gallery, pp. 3, 4, Another painting was ‘Idiot Savant.’ Initially, it was painted for a three person exhibition called ‘Fact and Fiction’ at Tibor de Nagy Gallery in New York in January 1984. The other two artists in the show were Thomas Nozkowski and Gary Stephan, both of whom I had an extensive dialogue with about abstract painting, at the time.
  36. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 64, ASIN B004526GWA, Solo Exhibitions - 1984 Annette Gmeiner, Kirchzarten, Germany; Tibor De Nagy, New York; 1986 Michael Werner, Cologne, Germany; Tibor De Nagy, New York
  37. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 63, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, Meets Collins & Milazzo at recommendation of framer Peter McCaffrey on 9th Street who does framing for Collins & Milazzo and Lasker.
  38. Cameron, Dan (October 1, 1999), "Dan Cameron on Collins & Milazzo", Artforum, p. 125, retrieved March 14, 2018, While permanently altering the nature of curatorial practice in the US, Collins & Milazzo’s role as catalyst in the late-’80s neo-Conceptual takeover of the East Village was no less decisive.
  39. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 63, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, Collins & Milazzo curate Lasker into three of their group shows
  40. Lasker, Jonathan (2009), One’s Self, By Chance, London: Timothy Taylor Gallery, p. 4, ASIN B01LT7E59Y, In Collins & Milazzo’s shows my work was contextualized with artists such as Ross Bleckner, Jeff Koons, Peter Halley, Robert Gober, and others, with whom I was in subsequent museum shows in the 1990s.
  41. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 65, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, Michael Werner visits studio, buys four paintings and offers to fly Lasker to Cologne to paint an exhibition for his gallery.
  42. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 48, ASIN B004526GWA, Solo Exhibitions - 1986 Michael Werner, Cologne, Germany
  43. Hobbs, Robert (2012), Early Works: Jonathan Lasker, New York, NY: Cheim & Read Gallery, p. 65, ISBN 978-0-9851410-0-4, Spends summer at manor house owned by Michael Werner in forest near Cologne. Paints show for Michael Werner there, using a former horse stable for a studio.
  44. Paparoni, Demetrio (2002), Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 1977-2001 (in Italian and English), Milano, Italia: Alberico Cetti Serbelloni Editore, p. 17, ISBN 88-88098-062, In 1985, Lasker adopted a particular working process which he perfected the following year and has applied ever since. The initial stage in-volves the drawing of small maquettes on white or colored paper using ballpoint pens, high-lighters, or extremely fine paintbrushes. Having obtained the desired image, Lasker uses oils to produce a new version of the study on paper. He then creates one or several variations of this study. Only once he has obtained the exact desired effect does he create a freehand version of the painting from this definitive study.
  45. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 8, ASIN B004526GWA
  46. Carrier, David (2002), Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 1977-2001 (in Italian and English), Milano, Italia: Alberico Cetti Serbelloni Editore, p. 166, ISBN 88-88098-062
  47. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 9, ASIN B004526GWA, I am very interested in the things in a painting being things unto themselves, which I would call 'things of paint.' It is in this literalness that I feel my pictures have a dialogue with Minimalism. […] I was trying to beat Minimalism at its own game. What I was proposing is that the Minimal-ist concept of ‘specific objects’ could be re-applied to the objects in a picture.
  48. Judd, Donald (2002). Kellein, Thomas (ed.). Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955-1968 (PDF). New York, NY: D.A.P. p. 184. ISBN 1891024515. The new three-dimensional work doesn't constitute a movement, school or style. The common aspects are too general and too little common to define a movement. The differences are greater than the similarities. The similarities are select-ed from the work; they aren't a movement's first principles or delimiting rules. Three-dimensionality is not as near being simply a container as painting and sculpture have seemed to be, but it tends to that. But now painting and sculpture are less neutral, less containers, more defined, not undeniable and unavoidable. They are particular forms circumscribed after all, producing fairly definite qualities. Much of the motivation in the new work is to get clear of these forms. The use of three dimensions is an obvious alternative.
  49. Judd, Donald (2002). Kellein, Thomas (ed.). Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955-1968 (PDF). New York, NY: D.A.P. p. 184. ISBN 1891024515. It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful. They are not diluted by an inherited format, variations of a form, mild contrasts and connecting parts and areas.
  50. Judd, Donald (2002). Kellein, Thomas (ed.). Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955-1968 (PDF). New York, NY: D.A.P. p. 184. ISBN 1891024515. The elements inside the rectangle are broad and simple and correspond closely to the rectan-gle. The shapes and surface are only those which can occur plausibly within and on a rectan-gular plane. The parts are few and so subordinate to the unity as not to be parts in an ordi-nary sense. A painting is nearly an entity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group of entities and references.
  51. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 9, ASIN B004526GWA, I am very interested in the things in a painting being things unto themselves, which I would call ‘things of paint.’ It is in this literalness that I feel my pictures have a dialogue with Minimalism. […] I was trying to beat Minimalism at its own game. What I was proposing is that the Minimalist concept of ‘specific objects’ could be reapplied to the objects in a picture.
  52. Judd, Donald (2002). Kellein, Thomas (ed.). Donald Judd: Early Work, 1955-1968 (PDF). New York, NY: D.A.P. p. 184. ISBN 1891024515. Materials vary greatly and are simply materials—formica, aluminum, cold-rolled steel, plexiglas, red and common brass, and so forth. They are specific. If they are used directly, they are more specific. Also, they are usually aggressive. There is an objectivity to the obdurate identity of a material.
  53. Yau, John (April 2, 2007), Jonathan Lasker with John Yau, The Brooklyn Rail, retrieved April 4, 2018
  54. "Complete Essays 1984-1998 by Jonathan Lasker". edgewisepress.org. Edgewise Press. Archived from the original on June 18, 2016. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  55. Lasker, Jonathan (1998), Complete Essays, New York, NY: Edgewise Press, p. 32, ISBN 096464665X, Image Kit
  56. Lasker, Jonathan (1998), Complete Essays, New York, NY: Edgewise Press, p. 21, ISBN 096464665X, Catalogue essay for the exhibition 'What It Is, Tony Shafrazi Gallery, N.Y.C., September 15 - October 12, 1986'
  57. Lasker, Jonathan (1998), Complete Essays, New York, NY: Edgewise Press, p. 21, ISBN 096464665X, The 40th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., April 11 - June 21, 1987.
  58. Lasker, Jonathan (1998), Complete Essays, New York, NY: Edgewise Press, p. 53, ISBN 096464665X, Catalogue statement for the exhibition Transatlantica, Caracas, Venezuela, July 1995
  59. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 52, ASIN B004526GWA, Selected Group Exhibitions, 1995, Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas, Venezuela, Transatlantica: The America Europa Non-Representiva, Jacob Karpio and Ruth Auerbach, Curators
  60. Lasker, Jonathan (1998), Complete Essays, New York, NY: Edgewise Press, p. 11, ISBN 096464665X, As is the case with many painters, my writing began somewhat reluctantly. Most of the first pieces were written to fulfill requests for artist’s statements to accompany exhibition catalogues. Texts such as these are verbal tools, which are used to illuminate and artist’s intent.
  61. Lasker, Jonathan (1998), Complete Essays, New York, NY: Edgewise Press, p. 9, ISBN 096464665X, from table of contents, Eugène Leroy: Falling in Lava; Racing Form, Observations from a Fire Escape on St. Mark’s Place, Willem de Kooning: Paintings for the Living
  62. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 9, ASIN B004526GWA, The titles are really my one-line shot at being a poet.
  63. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 9, ASIN B004526GWA, Sometimes the titles are about picture-making such as ‘Sensible Arrangement’ or ‘Hermeneutic Picture,’ but mostly they are not directly about that. Mostly I think of the titles as being parallel to the spirit of the paintings. The paintings tend to be ambiguous, and the titles are often ambiguous.
  64. Bernstein, Amy (2010), Jonathan Lasker: Recent Paintings, Los Angeles, CA: LA Louver, p. 11, ASIN B004526GWA, over the years, as [the] subject of language [in my paintings] has been introduced and reintroduced by others, I am sure it has influenced my own thinking about the work, and I have approached my painting a bit more from a language point of view. The big issue was not originally, specifically language, but the idea that there would be conflict and argument within the picture.
  65. Douglas, Welch (January 1981), "Jonathan Lasker", Arts: 2
  66. Carrier, David (January 1985), "Painting into Depth: Jonathan Lasker's Recent Art", Arts: 144
  67. Masheck, Joseph (January 1990), "Painting in Double Negative: Jonathan Lasker", Arts: 41, Thanks probably to the cult of [Jean] Baudrillard, there is a current, wrongheaded sense of a 'double' as some kind of deracinated simulacrum, as if, in Lasker’s case, the works were nothing more than stand-ins for abstract paintings.
  68. Masheck, Joseph (January 1990), "Painting in Double Negative: Jonathan Lasker", Arts: 41
  69. "Jonathan Lasker: Selective Identity". artforum.com. Artforum. September 1, 2001. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  70. Paparoni, Demetrio (2002), Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 1977-2001 (in Italian and English), Milano, Italia: Alberico Cetti Serbelloni Editore, p. 19, ISBN 88-88098-062, In contrast to Mondrian, [Lasker] does not desire the painting to be an object in itself and, in order to leave space for metaphor, confers subjective value on color. Most importantly, he considers the creative thought process behind the work and the sentiment that animates his formal choices of equivalent import.
  71. Hughes, Robert (January 21, 2012). "Jonathan Lasker". artslant.com. Artslant. Retrieved March 16, 2018. Lasker explores the inflections, the innuendoes of hues and geometric forms that represent themselves rather than convey meaning for representing something else. These are works that simply ask us to see. By reducing (or, perhaps, ennobling) a form to its basics – a gray rectangle, perhaps, that glows on a graph grid – then placing beside it a similar but altered shape whose bold colors give it recrudescent life, Lasker wants us to look at what we ignore, or to imagine what we suppress. These are joyous, reasoned, passionate works. They trace moods through something indecipherable – they are, after all, abstractions – but Lasker has a way of anchoring us to them. Sight made tactile, thought made figurative.
  72. "Collection/The History of the Boudoir". albrightknox.org. The Albright Knox Museum. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  73. "Untitled JONATHAN LASKER". artsbma.org. Birmingham Museum of Art. Retrieved March 16, 2018. TITLES Untitled (Proper), ARTIST Jonathan Lasker, United States, born 1948, MEDIUM oil on paper, CREDIT LINE AFI.17.2004, OBJECT NAME painting, CLASSIFICATION Paintings
  74. "By Jonathan Lasker in the Collection". thebroad.org. The Broad. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  75. "PERSPECTIVES – ACQUISITIONS POUR UN NOUVEAU MUSÉE". casino-luxembourg.lu. Casino Luxembourg. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  76. "Jonathan Lasker Stable Aberrance". centrepompidou.fr. Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  77. "Home » Collection » The Realm of the Quaint". nga.gov. National Gallery of Art. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  78. "Highbrow, Lowbrow". lacma.org. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  79. "The Value of Pictures". high.org. High Art Museum. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  80. "Arcane Reasoning". hirshhorn.si.edu. Hirshhorn Museum of Art Smithsonian. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  81. "Jonathan Lasker Fashionable Obscurity". moca.org. MOCA. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  82. "Jonathan Lasker An Experiment in Marriage 1-Ply". mfah.org. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  83. "Jonathan Lasker Untitled D-96". moma.org. MoMA. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  84. "Rustic Psyche". sis.modernamuseet.se. Moderna Museet. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  85. "Collection". caac.e. Centro Andaluz de Arte Contempoáneo. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  86. "Spring Training". kulturelles-erbe-koeln.de. Kulturelles Erbe Köln. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  87. "Jonathan Lasker Untitled 1987". collection.whitney.org. Whitney Museum of Art. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
  88. "Search the Collection: Jonathan Lasker". wichitaartmuseum.org. Wichita Art Museum. Retrieved March 16, 2018.
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