The Dallas Museum of Art will present the first major solo museum exhibition of work by American painter, Jonas Wood. Bringing together approximately 35 works across 13 years of Wood’s career, the exhibition "Jonas Wood" traces the artist’s fascination with psychology, memory, and the self to shed light on a practice that is both deeply personal and universal. 

Known for his colorful and compressed depictions of the people, places, and things that populate his daily life, Los Angeles-based painter Jonas Wood (b. 1977, Boston) creates works that bear clear traces of his biography in both form and content. Wood’s grandfather was an amateur painter whose personal collection of art included works by notable modernists such as Alexander Calder, Robert Motherwell, and Helen Frankenthaler. These artists, in addition to other modern masters ranging from Henri Matisse to David Hockney, have inspired Wood’s signature use of playful geometries, bold colors, and a distinct graphic style. Wood’s family members are recurrent characters in his paintings, as are the ceramics produced by his wife, artist Shio Kusaka, stressing the importance of familial dynamics in shaping identity, a notion central to his approach.           

Curated by Dr. Anna Katherine Brodbeck, The Nancy and Tim Hanley Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at the DMA, "Jonas Wood" brings together numerous facets of Wood’s artistic production. The exhibition juxtaposes works across subject matter and chronology, including snowy New England landscapes and Japanese gardens, still lifes abundant with plant matter, richly decorated modernist interiors, and portraits of the artist and his loved ones, to provide insight into Wood’s willingness to engage with traditional genres of painting while simultaneously exploring distinctly contemporary ideas grounded in his own signature brand of image making.