“My paintings of tennis courts were about an interest in abstraction, and how the court becomes a geometric puzzle.”
—Jonas WoodJonas Wood’s Four Majors (2018) is a quartet of screenprints depicting iconic tennis courts from the international tournaments in Melbourne, Paris, London, and New York. Rendered in bold, flat colours and simplified geometric forms, the courts simultaneously evoke their real-world locations while dissolving into striking abstractions. The saturated hues – bright blue hardcourt, red clay, and verdant grass – are juxtaposed with stark black voids, creating dynamic visual puzzles. Logos and court lines ground each scene in specificity, while their flattened, graphic treatment gives way to a playful ambiguity, turning physical spaces into imagined compositions.
Photograph taken by Jonas Wood, capturing tennis on the television in his studio, 2016. Image: © Wood Kusaka Studios “I watch all the tennis majors and started taking photographs of the TV a while back. These images led me to make drawings and paintings. I think of them as colour studies, abstract paintings with few details.”
—Jonas WoodThis interplay between reality and abstraction is a recurring theme in Wood’s work. His process often begins with cutting and collaging found images. “I’m a clipper,” Wood explains, “I have a lot of photos on my computer. I have books and magazines I’ve collected.” He has amassed a rich archive of inspiration – also including postcards from friends, Instagram screenshots, and interior design magazines – which he clips and combines in new compositions. Wood frequently deconstructs and reconfigures this source material, forging new scenes that blur past and present, real and imagined.
Wood revels in this uncertainty, as he described: “I’ve made many works that are pieced together from disparate found images but look like straight, unmanipulated found images. And there are works that are from straight found images but look like I made the whole thing up. I like that you don’t know where the work is coming from, if I orchestrated it or if I straight appropriated it.” Wood has noted that this tension between the recognisable and the invented is particularly central to his tennis court works, the source for which was photographs he took of the TV screen while watching tennis. In Four Majors, the familiar settings morph into abstract geometric puzzles – playful studies in colour and form, far from straightforward depictions of sport.
Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942, The Art Institute of Chicago. Image: The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource, NY/ Scala, Florence Wood’s attuned use of colour and composition to blur reality, memory, and imagination in Four Majors recalls the work of Edward Hopper. Hopper similarly drew inspiration from the everyday to craft striking and, at times, unnerving vignettes of ordinary life. Alike Hopper, in Four Majors Wood reduces human presence, removing the players and crowds of spectators. The result is an atmosphere akin to a set stage, waiting in anticipation of bright lights, a cast of actors, and the director yelling "action". Furthermore, similarly to Hopper’s scenes, Wood’s tennis courts distil the essence of a place into highly considered arrangements. Wood’s use of flat, Pop-inspired colour blocks and skewed perspectives creates an uncanny effect, rendering the courts both familiar and disorienting. This creates a trompe-l’œil effect that plays with depth, scale, colour, and vantage point, leaving viewers with an evocative yet enigmatic impression – one that leads us to question whether our sense of familiarity with the scene is real or imagined.
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Provenance
Karma, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2019Literature
Gagosian Gallery, Jonas Wood: Prints, New York, 2023, pp. 174-181
Property from a Private Japanese Collection
28
Four Majors
2018
The complete set of four screenprints in colours, on Coventry rag paper, the full sheets.
all S. 48.3 x 33 cm (19 x 12 7/8 in.)
All signed with initials, dated and numbered 19/50 in pencil (there were also 10 artist's proofs), co-published by WKS Editions, Los Angeles and Karma, New York, all framed.
Estimate
£40,000 - 60,000 ‡
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Evening & Day Editions
London Auction 23 - 24 January 2025
