Jonathan Lasker
Untitled, 2011,Tibetan wool and silk, 45" x 60", edition of 15 + 3APs - This rug is available in custom sizes
This rug is immediately identifiable as being by the artist Jonathan Lasker. His red signature squiggle motifs are woven from silk and create a soft, shiny luster contrast to the green and black areas made in wool. Lasker lives and works in New York City and has been exhibited internationally since the 1980s. He is represented in numerous public collections including the Eli Broad Foundation; Hirschhorn Museum; Museum Ludwig; Moderna Museet Stockholm; MoMA, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville. Lasker shows with Cheim & Read Gallery in New York and has had a 30 year association with BravinLee.
“I often think of my paintings as a form of image kit or perhaps as jigsaw puzzles, which offer components of paintings as clues pointing the viewer, not to a finished narrative (as when the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle completes the picture of Notre Dame), but rather to a self-awareness of how one construes a painting.
Throughout, I try to put things in non-normal relationships with one another. Why is a biomorphic form sitting on a flat patterned ground? Why does that neutral pattern suggest deep space? Does a certain pattern provide an interior or a landscape for a form to inhabit?
I also seek to thwart the potential narrative by making the viewer aware of paint and its physical properties. Paint has a peculiar capacity to become a locus for an experience of the actual, the concrete, in opposition to the depicted, the imagined.”
Image Kit, 1986 Lasker, Demetrio Paparoni, Alberico Cetti Serbelloni Editore, 2002)
BravinLee editions is a proud member of GoodWeave. GoodWeave’s founder Kailash Satyarthi was recently awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in honor of his career dedicated to ending the exploitation of children around the world. GoodWeave, an international nonprofit organization geared toward abolishing child labor in the carpet industry, has liberated and educated thousands of children, bringing them from carpet looms to classrooms. Satyarthi and GoodWeave work to guide consumers to its Child Labor Free Certified rugs and replicate their market-based approach of certification in other sectors. Kailash said at the ceremony, “I refuse to accept that the shackles of slavery can ever be stronger than the quest for freedom.” He asked those in attendance to place their hands over their hearts and “listen to the child inside.”