Double Play: Jonathan Lasker

With Double Play, Galerie Thomas Schulte presents the sixth solo exhibition by Jonathan Lasker, primarily featuring his large, bold paintings from the mid to late ‘80s, alongside a selection of recent works distilled to small formats on white backgrounds. Rooted in a period in which Lasker’s decades-spanning idiosyncratic, analytical approach to painting began to coalesce, here, continuities and unexpected turns are at play both within individual paintings and across their varied surfaces.

Doubles and repetitions are a prominent presence throughout Lasker’s practice. They may be found in line – as in the double lines in the newer works, which seem to emit a buzzing energy – or between a form and its shadow, silhouette or negative space. They may also appear as inversions, outlines, or amplifications. At times, repetitive doublings turn into patterns that wobble and shift.

In Double Play, a certainplayfulness is emphasized, as well as play as something staged or strategic: in his works, the spontaneous may become structural, and the structural veers into spontaneity. The tendency to combine and compound produces images in persistent motion and interplay – a being in two places at once.