Jonathan Lasker: Coloured Scribbles

Timothy Taylor Gallery is pleased to announce a major solo exhibition of new work by Jonathan Lasker, This will be Lasker's largest solo exhibition in London to date.
 
Jonathan Lasker is one of the most highly respected abstract painters of his generation. The exhibition 'Coloured Scribbles' consists of six large canvases and two smaller paintings, representing Lasker's output during 2003. To add a retrospective dimension the show then also includes an important painting from 1999, and a body of Lasker’s earliest preparatory drawings from 1986-88.
 
All these paintings begin as a set of postcard size drawings in which Lasker experiments with the placement of shapes and colours. When one drawing is finally selected, the large painting on canvas faithfully magnifies and replicates the drawing, allowing for surprising shifts in scale and mark-making.
 
There is always extreme contrast in Lasker's paintings. Giant primary-coloured brush-strokes, loaded with gooey paint, fight against flat, dry, linear grids with the complexity and clarity of computer graphics. None of the thick splurges of paint attempt expression, instead each stroke exalts handmade, technical virtuosity that can approximate machine-made precision.
 
Lasker was born in 1948 in New Jersey; he currently works and lives in New York.
 
Jonathan Lasker has had numerous solo exhibitions throughout Europe and North America, including the Institute of Contemporary Art of Pennsylvania (1992); Documenta IX (1992); Witte de With, Rotterdam (1993); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, which travelled to the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Kunstverein St Gallen (1997–98); the Forum for Contemporary Art, St Louis which travelled to the Power Plant, Toronto, and the Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham (1999-2000). In 2003 Lasker was the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, which travelled to the K20 in Düsseldorf.