Jonathan Lasker

Art Brokerage: Jonathan Lasker American Artist: b. 1948. Jonathan Lasker was born 1948 in Jersey City, New Jersey, and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City as well as California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Lasker's abstract paintings are characterized by big, bold brushstrokes, lively squiggles, and bright colors. Lasker's work seem to reveal an exuberant, playful approach to abstraction, but the paintings are anything but spontaneous. Working from small, meticulous studies to create what appear at first glance to be whimsical, offhand doodles, Lasker combines references to painters like Phillip Guston, Robert Ryman and Jackson Pollock with graffiti and cartoon imagery, investigating the various qualities of painting itself. "The problem concerns how much of the picture a viewer can receive and still be aware of the painting as a literal object," he says. Titles like Margin For Error (2009), The Rules of the Game (2010), and Assertive Absence (1999) suggest that the questions Lasker struggles with on the canvas can also be read as analogies for everyday experience. Lasker has been awarded National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant in 1987 and again in 1989. In 1989 he was also awarded the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Listings wanted.