Juxtapoz Magazine - Preview: "Jonas Wood: Prints 2" @ Gagosian, West 24th Street, New York

Juxtapoz Magazine – Preview: “Jonas Wood: Prints 2” @ Gagosian, West 24th Street, New York

Jonas Wood has said of printmaking, “You have to build the print piece by piece. I just love the way it looks, the process, the whole feel of it. It’s irreplaceable.” In Wood’s hands and with the help and expertise of master printmakers he works with, there is something completely alive in Wood’s prints. I think of the 112-color Kitchen Interior (2022), a screen print that took over 20 months to produce and demonstrates the most mundane of moments, the domestic life of a kitchen, in almost surreal intensity and layered beauty. That is perhaps why Wood is so perfect as printamaker, the idea of taking something almost unseen and underappreciated and elevating it to unfathomable visionary, painstakingly executed epics. 

In Gagosian’s Jonas Wood: Prints 2, the follow-up to 2018 Jonas Wood: Prints, the artist develops a mastery in the art form but also a mastery in the art of collaboration. The prints here in this show, works made with Aliso Editions, Cirrus Gallery & Cirrus Editions Ltd., Counter Editions, Hamilton Press, Mixografía, Pace Editions, as well with experts in his own print house, WKS Editions, see Wood creating aquatint, hard-ground and soft-ground etching, lithography, screen printing, and woodcuts, as well as various hybrid processes. The result is a conversation between painting and printmaking, how the two can go hand-in-hand, and how an artist can use both methods to propel a vision forward. —Evan Pricco