Frye Salon + Jonathan Lasker

Lasker's postmodern abstraction meets the Frye collection's turn-of-the-century representation

Published with Frye Art Museum.

Since the late 1970s, American painter Jonathan Lasker (born 1948) has cultivated a distinct formal vocabulary of structural grids, graphic scribbled lines and thick impasto strokes of paint. Lasker employs the familiar tools of representational painting--figure and ground, space and perspective--to destabilize its dividing line with abstraction. In keeping with Lasker's line of formal inquiry, this compact volume presents an unlikely yet productive pairing: a selection of the artist's large canvases intermingled with the Frye Art Museum's collection of late 19th- and early 20th-century paintings. Embedded within the museum's salon, Lasker's compositions open unexpected conversations across time, style and painterly intent. The publication includes photographs of the exhibition, as well as a foreword by collector Judy Greenstein, an essay by director Jamilee Lacy that discusses the exhibition in the context of Lasker's overall practice, and an interview between the artist and Lacy.