Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka – one a painter and the other a potter – extend their partnership from married life to creative practice and are currently exhibiting together at Gagosian Hong Kong. Blackwelder features the former’s paintings and works on paper and the latter’s ceramics created at the couple’s Blackwelder Street studio in Los Angeles. Through drawings, collages, watercolours and oils, Wood presents a semi-fictional version of the city full of lush vegetation framed within pots and vases. Influences of Hockney and Matisse are evident, although Wood has a style of his own that comes from a cut-out effect – his vessels placed flat on neutral backgrounds – and a use of distorted scale. Inside the pots we find an other-world of golf courses, gardens and coral reefs whose intuitively-sprawling vistas end suddenly at the boundary of their container.
Kusaka’s pottery extends these themes to the three dimensional world, acting as muse to her husband’s artwork. Her pieces take the form of traditional Japanese stoneware and porcelain, with influences of Iron Age ceramics and the silt pottery of ancient Egypt; dimples and pinches on the surface lend a haptic element to the work. Blackwelder continues until 28 February.
Jonas Wood
Red Studio Pot, 2014
Oil and acrylic on canvas 72 x 72 inches
182.9 x 182.9 cm
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Shio Kusaka
(dinosaur 24), 2014
stoneware
28 1/2 x 15 3/4 x 13 1/4 inches
72.4 x 40 x 33.7 cm
Courtesy Gagosian Galler
Jonas Wood
Landscape Pot 1, 2014
Oil and acrylic on canvas
118 x 93 inches
299.7 x 236.2 cm
Courtesy Gagosian Gallery
Installation views,
‘Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka Blackwelde’ at Gagosian Gallery Hong Kong,
January 16 to February 28, 2015.
