My forms are not rendered spatially. My paintings of tennis courts were about an interest in abstraction, and how the court becomes a geometric puzzle. There also is text, because of the advertising. My work is under-painted with big flat shapes of color; that is how they start. They are generated from an abundance of flat planes built up on top of each other. – Jonas Wood
Based on photographs taken from his television, Jonas Wood’s Tennis Court drawings feature the famous tennis courts of the world in a portrait format, with thick black bars around the central image imitating how the photographs would appear on his phone’s screen. Wood has repeatedly returned to the grass court of Wimbledon (as he has done with the clay court of the French Open and the hard court of the US Open), and each interpretation of the subject showcases his playful sensibility and eye for composition. In this simplified version of the court, Wood translates the setting into fields of flat color interrupted with a hand-scrawled net. The dramatic green stripes of the grass dominate the image, and the advertising signs of the international event appear as pixelated pink shapes in the upper register. Jonas Wood was the featured artist at last year’s TWO x TWO for AIDS and Art. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Dallas Museum of Art; MoMA, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Whitney Museum, New York; and LACMA, among others. The Dallas Museum of Art will present the first major solo museum exhibition of Wood’s work in 2019.