Jonas Wood (born 1977 in Boston) studied psychology as an undergraduate before completing an MFA in painting at the University of Washington in 2002. He assisted the painter Laura Owens early in his career — a formative apprenticeship in studio practice — before his 2006 solo debut in Los Angeles established him as an artist to watch. Wood is based in Los Angeles, where he shares a studio with his wife, the ceramicist Shio Kusaka; the relationship between their practices runs both ways — Kusaka's vessels appear constantly in his still lifes, while motifs from his paintings resurface on her pots.

Jonas Wood's painting begins away from the canvas. He works from photographs — his own snapshots, family pictures, images sent by others — cutting and layering them into collages that fix composition before a brushstroke is applied. What results is not simple flatness but a deliberately built ornamental density: interlocking planes of pattern, texture, and colour that carry as much psychological weight as any depicted object. The comparison to Gustav Klimt is apt — both artists treat pattern as content rather than decoration, letting ornament and repetition do work that figuration alone could not.

That tension between figuration and abstraction is nowhere clearer than in Jonas Wood's tennis court paintings, begun in 2010 and developed across several major series. Composed from television broadcasts rather than the game itself, they strip away players, balls, and spectators, leaving only the foreshortened geometry of the court — a field of flat colour indebted to Josef Albers's Homage to the Square. What began as figurative subject matter becomes, through Wood's systematic removal of narrative detail, colour-field abstraction. It is the clearest demonstration in his practice of a method he learned early from David Hockney: that flatness is not a limitation but a way of seeing more clearly.

Sport runs through his broader artwork as well. A committed collector of vintage memorabilia, Jonas Wood began painting trading cards in 2005, describing them as "ready-made portraits" — a fittingly self-aware term for an artist whose own signed prints have become sought-after collectibles.

Two Tables with Floral Pattern (2013) became Jonas Wood's auction record when it sold for $6.5 million at Christie's New York in 2021 — a still life painting whose interlocking, wallpaper-dense patterning distils his central technique: figuration built from flattened, decorative structure, close in spirit to Klimt's treatment of ornament as psychological information.

His tennis court paintings, including the artwork French Open with Wood Grain (2025), are the fullest expression of his figuration-into-abstraction method. Sourced from televised matches and stripped of every player and ball, these canvases reduce the game to pure geometric colour field — a flattened style carrying its subject to near-total abstraction while keeping its representational origin.

Ovitz's Library (2013), now in the permanent collection of the Guggenheim Museum, marked a turning point in Jonas Wood's process. Commissioned by the collector and MoMA trustee Michael Ovitz to depict his art-filled Beverly Hills home — its shelves and staircase hung with artworks by Alexander Calder, Martin Kippenberger, and Mark Grotjahn — it was the first painting Wood completed without a preparatory drawing, a habit he had followed rigidly until then. "That was a big breakthrough for me," he later said.

Jungle Kitchen (2017), a densely patterned interior painting, marked a shift in his printmaking as well as his painting: the etching made from it, developed with printmaker Jacob Samuel, condensed several years of studio collaboration and mark-making into a single, technically ambitious artwork.

Jonas Wood is among the most serious painter-printmakers working today — a modern peintre-graveur in the tradition of artists who treat the print studio as a second, equally rigorous practice rather than a commercial sideline. He has said, "I'm pretty heavy into printmaking," and the numbers bear it out: limited edition prints account for the majority of his artwork sold at auction, an unusually high figure for a painter of his market standing.

His education in the medium came directly from Jacob Samuel, the Los Angeles printmaker who had been Sam Francis's personal printer since 1981. Beginning in 2013, Wood spent a year and a half learning hard-ground and soft-ground etching, spit bite, aquatint, and chine-collé — the technique of bonding coloured Japanese paper to a print's surface — documenting his progress across the 8 Etchings (2014) series. Jonas Wood has cited Ed Ruscha as a direct inspiration for treating printmaking, drawing, and painting as one mutually informing practice — a connection made literal when Wood rented his primary studio from Ruscha in 2007, working there for a decade in the space where Ovitz's Library and the basketball studies behind Bball Studio (2019) were made. He has spoken of wanting to do for younger printmakers what Ruscha's example did for him.

That ambition led Jonas Wood to found WKS Editions — Wood Kusaka Studios — his own print house, built with Samuel and staffed by specialist printers including Kevin Giffen, Daniel Wlazlak, and Sam Gessow. It is an unusual step for a painter of his generation: rather than working to an outside publisher's schedule, Jonas Wood set up an atelier on his own terms, producing the Matisse Pot screenprints (2018) — thirty-colour prints in homage to Henri Matisse and Kusaka's ceramics — and the 8 Pots (2017) etchings, developed further under his own roof.

For collectors, a Jonas Wood print for sale is a way to own an original part of his oeuvre — at a fraction of the cost of a painting. Paintings and editions are held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.