Thomas Schulte

Galerie Thomas Schulte presents an exhibition with new paintings by the New York-based artist Jonathan Lasker (born 1948 in New Jersey City, NJ, USA). Lasker made use of the art world’s conceptual turn in the 1980s, engaging in new possibilities of painting, and so developing the abstract formal idiom that has come to characterize his oeuvre. Resisting the Lyrical Abstraction, Field Painting and Minimalist movements of the 1970s, Lasker saw himself confronted with the challenge of pictorial invention. As an answer to this quest, he devised a self-referential system using a vocabulary of sign-like shapes and colors. The formal language of his paintings is abstract, while the visual means range from simple line drawings to thick paste-like applications of paint. While Lasker mostly works with large-scale formats, he also explores smaller compositions. His small maquettes allow for precise attention to detail, which the artist subsequently reproduces in his large-scale paintings. Thus Lasker turns the organic, subjective and gestural pictorial idiom of painting into an increasingly intellectual process. Lasker’s work has been shown in exhibitions world-wide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA P.S.1, documenta 9, Museo Reina Sofía, Stedelijk Museum, Pinakothek der Moderne, MUDAM, Luxembourg, Centre Georges Pompidou and the Hayward Gallery.