EP 5: JONATHAN LASKER’s COMPLETE ESSAYS 1984-1998 provides us with an important historical document about the development of American abstract painting over the course of nearly two decades. Besides analyzing the work of Piet Mondrian, Willem de Kooning, and Eugène Leroy, and the critic Clement Greenberg, the artist discusses abstract painting’s relationship to violence, sensation, the media, the physical and cognitive world of images, consciousness and mortality in the contemporary world. In his thinking and work, as evidenced in these essays, Lasker explores “the unhappy marriages of the biomorphic and the decorative, the mark of the loaded brush and the geometric, the psyche and popular culture.”

JONATHAN LASKER was born in Jersey City, N.J., in 1948. He attended the School of Visual Arts, New York, from 1975 to 1977, and the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, Ca., in 1977. Lasker’s paintings have also been exhibited at the Corcoran in Washington, D.C., the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, Documenta IX in Kassel, and the Reina Sofia in Madrid. He has lectured extensively in the United States and Europe, and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1987 and 1989.  Lasker’s paintings were the subject of a traveling museum retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Nordrhein-Westfalen Musem in Düsseldorf. 

COMPLETE ESSAYS 1984-1998 comprises Jonathan Lasker’s first collection of writings. First edition paperback, March 1998, 64 pp., sewn, bound and printed in Italy, with a two-color cover and a black and white photograph of the artist on the frontispiece. 

Previous / Next