Jonathan Lasker's visual language is disturbing to the viewer. His paintings, many on glowing monochrome grounds, are hugely immediate, even raw. Lasker's pictures are a discourse on painting: he takes the formal repertoire of abstract art, breaks it open and redefines it. Grids and gestural elements in his paintings join with knots of lines, hachures, biomorphic forms and ornamental structures - paintings, that is, which are precisely planned as sketches on paper or as "maquettes." Supposedly spontaneous brushstrokes thus prove to be the result of careful deliberation: pictorial elements "which may resemble coincidence but which are not coincidental." Jonathan Lasker's oeuvre, as powerful as it is provocative, is presented here with essays by Konrad Bitterli and Hans-Michael Herzog, a wide-ranging conversation with the artist himself and full-page illustrations portraying his "brilliant system of visual thought, feeling and colorful illumination." The artist: Jonathan Lasker, born 1948 in New Jersey. 1975-1977 School of Visual Arts, New York City. 1977 California Institute of the Arts, Valencia/Kalifornien. 1992 documenta IX in Kassel.