JONATHAN LASKER: EARLY WORKS 1977- 1985 (CHEIM & READ, NEW YORK)

Lasker was born in Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1948. After attending Queens College and the School of Visual Arts in New York, he enrolled in CalArts, in Valencia, California, in the late 1970s. His time at CalArts, which coincided with the school's heyday of Conceptualism, became an important determining factor on his work. Committed to painting and its history, Lasker defended his chosen medium against a critical audience of teachers and fellow students, most of whom dismissed painting as "dead" in a post-modern era. CalArt's Conceptualism challenged Lasker to rethink painting's significance and "progression," thus strengthening his arguments. He adhered to the rigorous critical discourse of his peers but re-positioned it for a different end, ultimately exposing the unique dialectic inherent to painting: its objecthood versus that which it represents. Both physical and illusionist, literal and figurative, dimensional and flat, painting's contradictory elements have provided Lasker with continually rich territory.