Jonathan Lasker (°1948, Jersey City, New Jersey, USA) is an American painter whose distinctive approach to abstraction combines carefully structured compositions with deliberately awkward, almost doodle-like forms. Thickly painted shapes, looping lines, grids and fields of colour coexist within his canvases, creating images that appear spontaneous while being meticulously constructed.
Lasker studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and at the California Institute of the Arts before establishing himself in New York during the early 1980s. At a time when painting was being reconsidered after the dominance of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, he developed an approach that treated abstract forms almost as characters or signs, each occupying a specific role within the composition.
His paintings frequently begin with small studies in which individual motifs are developed before being transferred to larger canvases. Rather than pursuing the spontaneous gesture associated with Abstract Expressionism, Lasker deliberately separates invention from execution. The resulting works balance intuition and structure, allowing seemingly simple marks to suggest objects, figures, landscapes or fragments of an unknown visual language.
Since the 1980s, Lasker has exhibited extensively in Europe and the United States. Major surveys of his work have been presented at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf. His work is represented in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum Ludwig, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Today, Jonathan Lasker continues to live and work in New York. His unmistakable combination of graphic simplicity, physical paint and conceptual precision has established him as an important voice in the renewal and development of abstract painting from the 1980s onwards.