Jonathan Lasker's work is often considered bizarre, yet it is one of the
most influential in contemporary abstract art. In the late 1970s and
early 1980s, a period when everything was in flux, when Abstract
Expressionism, Minimalism, and Color Field painting were no longer
formally binding, Lasker succeeded like no one else in realizing themes
such as referentiality, figuration, genuine materiality and
corporeality, even aspects of the decorative and pictorial. The
tastefully executed paintings and carefully crafted objects of the 1960s
had reached the end of their days in terms of form; there was a recourse
to styles and materials that not only served artists as art historical
sources but as New Image painting, patterns, and decorations, and
resulted in new artistic content. In short, abstraction as understood
and applied by Jonathan Lasker had reached the postmodern age. This
volume shows a series of beautiful preliminary studies of this process
on paper, as well as large-format oil paintings from 1977 to 1981 that
demonstrate their their radical pictorial implementation.