{"id":1817604,"date":"2026-03-09T18:01:12","date_gmt":"2026-03-09T15:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1817604"},"modified":"2026-03-09T18:01:12","modified_gmt":"2026-03-09T15:01:12","slug":"jonas-wood-debuts-new-tennis-court-paintings-in-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1817604","title":{"rendered":"Jonas Wood Debuts New Tennis Court Paintings in Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/22024_JW_Portrait-in-Studio_June2024.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tJonas Wood has been watching sports his whole life, and the habit has followed him into the studio. \u201cI played tons of sports when I was a kid and I was obsessed with following them,\u201d Wood said, speaking with me by Zoom from his Los Angeles studio. \u201cI used to read the entire sports section in the\u00a0Boston Globe<\/em>, all the stats and everything.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen he got out of grad school, Wood wanted to practice portraiture, but was \u201ckind of exhausted trying to find personal subjects\u2014friends, family, myself.\u201d So he started using sports cards and images of basketball and baseball players he grew up with. It was just a way to practice painting the figure.<\/p>\n

\n\tTennis arrived more casually\u2014almost by accident\u2014while Wood was watching matches late at night in the studio.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI remember watching the Australian Open and taking pictures of the TV with my phone,\u201d he told me, occasionally looking off camera to dip his brush in paint. \u201cThe lights were off in the studio and the court was just this solid color with these lines cutting through it. I thought, that\u2019s a really interesting painting idea. Everything I do is based on photographs, taking photos, appropriating photos, so I started collecting these images and testing it out.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Wood\u2019s paintings the players disappear, the ball vanishes, and what remains is the court itself: bright color, white lines, and a net cutting the image in half.<\/p>\n

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Jonas Wood, Porsche Tennis Grand Prix<\/em>, 2025. \u00a9 Jonas Wood Photo: Marten Elder Courtesy Gagosian<\/span>Photo: Marten Elder<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tThose stripped-down compositions form the basis of Wood\u2019s new exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, which gathers paintings based on courts from tournaments across the global tennis calendar\u2014ATP, WTA, and Olympic events. Each canvas presents the court from the familiar broadcast vantage point behind the baseline, compressing the playing surface into flat bands of color.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe idea for the new group of paintings had been sitting in Wood\u2019s studio for years.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI actually wrote myself a note on the wall maybe eight or nine years ago that said something like, \u2018All ATP tour stops\u2014one work?\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cIf I was going to revisit the tennis paintings seriously, I wanted to really go through the whole tour and see all the differences in the courts\u2014the colors, the sponsors, the signage, all these little variations that I hadn\u2019t explored before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAbout three years ago he decided to follow through. Wood subscribed to the Tennis Channel and began systematically photographing tournament finals as they aired.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI was watching the ATP and WTA finals, the Olympic finals, and taking screenshots in my studio,\u201d he said. \u201cAt some point it became more about capturing the colors and shapes than actually watching the matches. I was building this archive of images and then making collages from them.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThose collages became the starting point for the paintings in the exhibition. In some works the court appears framed by fragments of Wood\u2019s studio\u2014lights hanging from the ceiling or handwritten notes pinned to the wall.<\/p>\n

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Jonas Wood, Shanghai Masters<\/em>, 2025 \u00a9 Jonas Wood Photo: Marten Elder Courtesy Gagosian<\/span>Photo: Marten Elder<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\t\u201cThe tennis court is basically three or four bands of color in a rectangle,\u201d Wood said. \u201cThat\u2019s very close to something like Albers or other geometric abstraction. So, for me, it became this way to investigate color\u2014balancing these saturated courts against black backgrounds or against other images from my studio. Tennis is the vehicle, but the real question is how to make those colors work together.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWood says he\u2019s a tennis fan, though he\u2019s careful not to overstate the role it plays in his life. He mentioned longtime favorites like Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, along with more recent players such as Novak Djokovic and Jannik Sinner.<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the best pictures in the show is based not on a professional match but rather on a Nintendo tennis game Wood played with his children.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThey\u2019re so seemingly not serious,\u201d he said. \u201cBut they\u2019re made very deliberately. I like that people can come to them for different reasons\u2014because they like tennis, because they like color, because they\u2019re interested in painting. It doesn\u2019t have to be one thing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs our conversation wrapped up, Wood was still tinkering. He turned a canvas still in the making slightly to show me his progress. It depicted fruit on a table, seen partly from the side so the edge of the plywood panel became part of the composition.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPainting is kind of athletic in a way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/22024_JW_Portrait-in-Studio_June2024.jpg?w=1024″] Jonas Wood has been watching sports his whole life, and the habit has followed him into the studio. \u201cI played tons of sports when I was a kid and I was obsessed with following them,\u201d Wood said, speaking with me by Zoom from his Los Angeles studio. \u201cI used to read the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1817604","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1817604","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1817604"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1817604\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1817604"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1817604"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1817604"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}