There is a particular quality of attention that sport demands — not the contemplative, wandering gaze of a museum visitor, but something faster, more athletic, more alive to pattern and trajectory. Jonas Wood has always been an artist of that kind of attention: alert to the geometry of a room, the repeat of a pattern, the way a flat surface can hold the memory of three-dimensional space. In his new body of work at Gagosian Beverly Hills, on view through April 25, he turns that attention to tennis, and the results are some of the most energized paintings of his career.
The tennis paintings are, on their surface, about the sport. Courts rendered in Wood’s characteristic flat, bold style — the hard geometry of baselines and service boxes, the vivid colors of clay and hard court and grass, the compressed perspective that makes a tennis court from above look like an abstract composition that has somehow acquired rules. Players appear as simplified figures, almost glyphic, their poses caught mid-stroke or mid-serve in a way that suggests motion without depicting it. The net bisects canvases with the clean authority of a horizon line.
But as with everything Wood makes, the subject is also a vehicle for something deeper. Tennis is a game of pattern and repetition — of the same strokes, the same geometry, the same back-and-forth executed with infinitely varying results. Wood’s paintings have always been about exactly this: the way pattern structures experience, the way repetition reveals rather than deadens, the way a familiar image can be looked at so intently that it becomes newly strange.
Wood, who was born in Boston in 1977 and has been based in Los Angeles for much of his adult life, developed his distinctive visual language over two decades of sustained, quietly radical painting. He is an artist who has absorbed an enormous range of influences — Japanese woodblock prints, Matisse, David Hockney, basketball cards, interior design magazines — and metabolized them into something entirely his own. His canvases are flat without being cold, patterned without being decorative, personal without being confessional.
His recurring subjects — his home and studio, his wife the ceramicist Shio Kusaka, his children, his plant collection, basketball, interiors layered with art — have always functioned less as autobiography than as a laboratory for formal investigation. What does a room look like when every surface pattern is given equal visual weight? What happens to a portrait when the background is as insistent as the face? These are the questions that organize his work, and they are, at heart, questions about painting itself — about what the medium can hold, how it structures looking, what it means to represent a world that is already saturated with images.
The shift to tennis in this new body of work feels both unexpected and inevitable. Wood has long been drawn to sports as subject matter — basketball appears throughout his career, treated with the same loving formal attention he gives to cacti and ceramics. But tennis offers something different: a more geometric game, a more graphically legible space, a tradition of representation that runs from Lichtenstein to contemporary photography.
The court itself is a gift to a painter like Wood — a bounded rectangle subdivided into precise zones, a space where position means everything, where the geometry of the game and the geometry of representation can be made to rhyme. His courts glow with the saturated color of memory and broadcast television simultaneously, at once real and constructed, observed and imagined.
There is also something in tennis that speaks to Wood’s broader preoccupations with domesticity and intimacy. Unlike team sports played before massive crowds in vast stadiums, tennis is a game of one-on-one encounter, played in a space that feels almost domestic in its scale, watched from seats close enough to hear the ball hit the strings. Wood’s paintings capture this quality — the strange intimacy of the sport, the way a tennis court can feel like a room.
Gagosian Beverly Hills is the right venue for this work. The gallery’s elegant, light-filled space on Camden Drive allows Wood’s large canvases room to breathe and be read at the distance they require. Gagosian has long championed Wood’s practice, and the relationship has produced some of the most significant exhibitions of his career.
Wood is an artist in full command of his practice, and these tennis paintings show him pushing into new territory while remaining absolutely himself. The palette is bold, the compositions are tight and inventive, the surfaces reward the close looking that Wood’s work always demands and always repays. There is joy in these paintings — the particular joy of an artist who has found a new subject that opens onto all his old questions, and found them newly alive.
Jonas Wood is on view at Gagosian Beverly Hills, 456 N Camden Drive, Los Angeles, through April 25, 2026.
