Jonathan Lasker: Pictures for Happy Existentialists

Timothy Taylor is pleased to announce Pictures for Happy Existentialists, an exhibition by Jonathan Lasker. Opening 24 April in London, the presentation will feature paintings and drawings dating from 1990 through 2025, offering a curated survey of Lasker’s singular exploration into line, figure, and ground.

 

Over his four-decade career, Lasker has conducted a rigorous examination of painting’s pictorial space. A master colourist, he creates riotously hued canvases that challenge our perception of form and the way we identify subjects in space. He fluidly moves between conscious and subconscious decision-making, generating paintings that invite viewers to engage in a similar dialogue. Though his works possess the energy of spontaneous mark-making, each painting in fact results from a lengthy process in which drawn studies are carefully translated onto canvas. 

 

Lasker begins by drawing on small, spiral-bound pieces of paper. These initial exercises are then developed into miniature oil studies on paper, where he works out problems of colour, composition, and mark-making, finding resolution or surprise in the dynamics that arise among his discrete elements of figure, ground, and line. He creates spatial ambiguities, intersecting competing perspectives and gestalts. Lines that suggest deep, illusory space coexist with those that assert the flatness of the picture plane. These studies serve as the foundation for his large-scale works on canvas, where he layers paint in various textures and applications—thin pen-like blue scribbles will sit next to flat, black marker-like lines and thick bubble-gum impasto. Throughout, Lasker consistently subverts any unified logic regarding how his paintings might be “read.” 

 

Across his work, Lasker’s dashed or glyph-like forms evoke language. Each responds to the next as if in dialogue—echoing, shadowing, or inverting one another. Slab constructions, cursive swirls, and biomorphic knobs recur among the paintings in the exhibition, creating another discursive level that transcends the canvas. Our presentation features works from 1990, 2003, 2017, and 2021 composed of graphite, coloured pencil, India ink, and acrylic, alongside vibrant oil paintings completed this year.