Celebrated contemporary American artist, Jonas Wood, surrounded by plants in his studio.
Blurring the boundaries between abstract and figurative art, Jonas Wood has established his reputation as an artist who records contemporary American life whilst engaging with a myriad of artistic traditions and movements. He has been compared to giants such as David Hockney, Alex Katz, and Edward Hopper, and he is regarded as one of the most important painters on the market today.
Yet Wood has also said “I’m pretty heavy into printmaking”, and he enjoys experimenting with different techniques in his studio. Prints account for 61% of his work sold at auction, and they usually fetch between £500 and £1,000, though a significant number have reached up to £5,000, and some have attained even higher prices.
Below is a list of the six most expensive Jonas Wood prints sold at auction. If you’d like to find out more about how much your Jonas Wood print might be worth, or how to sell it, why not get in touch with Mark Littler today?
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Fish Pot/Matisse Pot/Snoopy Pot
Jonas Wood is married to the Japanese ceramic artist, Shio Kusaka, and the two have been sharing a studio space together for several years now. Their relationship and shared working space means they often influence each other’s work, and ideas and motifs frequently shift back and forth between the pair’s creations.
Wood said that when he first met Kusaka, he “started looking at vessels. I became interested in Greek pots. Like basketball cards, they have a shape and a form, and they have images that are very flat, graphic, and simple. Basically, there are cartoons on the sides of the pots that tell stories.” Wood has been using printmaking to experiment with his own modern versions of these Greek pots ever since, all of which are extremely popular at auction. In this series of three prints, he took inspiration from both pop culture (Snoopy) and art history (Matisse), and the prints were sold by Christie’s in May 2024 for £78,723.
Fish Pot/Matisse Pot/Snoopy Pot sold by Christie’s in 2024
Four Majors
Alongside pots, sports are a major theme in Wood’s art, with particular focus on basketball and tennis (which he purportedly watches in his studio whilst working). In Wood’s own words, “my paintings of tennis courts were about an interest in abstraction, and how the court becomes a geometric puzzle.” This is reflected in these four vibrant, pared back screenprints from 2018 which represent the four courts of Grand Slam tournaments; they were sold by Phillips in June 2021 for £75,000, impressively exceeding their estimated £30,000 to £50,000.
Four Majors sold by Phillips in 2021
Three Clippings
Pot plants and cuttings often appear in Wood’s work; the artist stated he’s drawn to plants because of “the colour and the symmetry and the shapes and the patterns”, all of which make them “a good building block” for paintings. He’s also said he believes that “plants are foundational for artists”, citing names such as Hockney and Matisse, whose work has often featured vegetation.
Indeed, plants are among Wood’s most popular motifs; his 2013 painting Two Tables with Floral Pattern set a new record for the artist when it was sold by Christie’s in May 2021 for £3.8 million, Wood’s highest price to date. But plants are also the subject of numerous Wood prints, including Three Clippings from 2018, which was sold by Phillips in September 2019 for £70,000.
Three Clippings sold by Phillips in 2019
Untitled
These four lithographs from 2014 are regularly among Jonas Wood’s best-selling prints, accounting for four out of his ten most expensive prints sold at auction. This particular set exceeded its estimate by almost £15,000 when it was sold by Phillips in October 2018 for £68,477.
Wood himself called the prints “some of my most successful”; he said he “merged a collage concept with lithography to make cutout photos of landscape pots with silkscreened plants ‘growing’ out of them. It was a great learning experience”. The artist almost always works from photos, but these prints demonstrate his desire to learn new techniques and keep experimenting. As he once said: “I’m still expanding. There are always new things I want to paint about, but there’s a lot I still keep coming back to.”
Untitled sold by Phillips in 2018
Matisse Pot 1/Matisse Pot 2/Matisse Pot 3
Jonas Wood was surrounded by canonical artwork from a young age as his grandfather had an impressive collection of art, featuring the likes of Francis Bacon and Picasso, and Wood has stated his parents had Andy Warhol and Matisse prints, too. His artistic education was furthered by his studies; Wood majored in psychology and minored in studio art, then in 2002, he received an MFA in painting and drawing from the University of Washington in Seattle.
It is no surprise, then, that different artistic traditions and movements have found their way into Wood’s practice. Matisse is particularly influential, and Wood often echoes or pays homage to the extraordinary French artist in his own work, including in this series of three screenprints in colours which were sold by Phillips in October 2018 for £49,455.
Mattise Pot 1, 2 and 3 sold by Phillips in 2018
Landscape Pots: Night Bloom, Orchid and Bromeliad
Wood has said in the past that “most of the time I just make prints for myself, not for anyone else. I just like making editions in the studio – not to even release… just to make stuff.” This enjoyment of the printing process is one of the things that propelled him to create these three prints in 2019, with the artist stating: “I was interested in pairing the realism of plants from my studio… with etchings I had made in 2017.” Wood explained “it was fun using multiple printing techniques and trying out various colours for the plants and pots until it felt right.” As well as being fun, it was clearly profitable; the series was sold by Lama in February 2022 for £36,782, more than £13,000 above its estimate.
Landscape Pots: Night Bloom, Orchid and Bromeliad sold by Lama in 2022
