The Great Indoors

Jonas Wood has shot to global fame by bringing still-life painting into the 21st century. His latest exhibition opens in Hong Kong this month

- Oliver Giles

Painter Jonas Wood has always loved plants. As a child, he would spend hours in his parents’ and grandparents’ gardens in Boston, taking clippings of his favourite flowers. At college, he filled his room with potted ferns. And when he moved to California in 2003, when he was in his mid-twenties, greenery began to creep into his work. “In grad school, I was painting based on Bacon and

Picasso,” he says on a video call from his studio in Los Angeles, referring to the moody, and sometimes violent, works of Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso. “But I found myself moving from darkness to light when I moved to California. Coming from the East Coast to the West Coast, the climate is so different. There are so many cacti and succulents here—they’re almost prehistoric. I was just leaning into the things I was into.”

It paid off. Wood abandoned his earlier moody aesthetic in favour of the work he is famous for today— bright, colourful paintings that play with scale and perspective, turning complex shapes into his signature flattened style. Woods’ distinctive still lifes have made him one of the most in-demand artists working today, popular among both intellectual collectors and curators, who have placed his paintings in institutions such as New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim, as well as with luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Bamford Watch Department, which have tapped him for collaborations.