Jonathan Lasker (born 1948) is an American abstract painter based in New York City whose work has played an integral role in the development of Postmodern Painting.

[19] He was the subject of the 2005 book Jonathan Lasker: Expressions Become Things by Richard Milazzo which documented his process of developing abstract compositions from sketches to paintings.

[22] He spent his teenage years reading widely, with a special interest in the Beat poets and in such early modern playwrights as August Strindberg, George Bernard Shaw, and Eugene O'Neill.

[23] Originally aspiring to become a musician, Lasker left New York after studying at Queens College and played bass guitar and blues harmonica in bands in the US and Europe.

In 1975, after resettling in New York, he began taking night courses at the SVA, where he turned his attention to paintings and collages inspired by the work of Robert Rauschenberg.

[25] Lasker discussed this period in an interview with Amy Bernstein: At CalArts, to be a painter meant you had to take a stance, because there was a very antagonistic attitude towards painting there.

[26]The ideas that Lasker adopted at this early stage in his career brought an analytical approach to the supposedly outmoded practice of making a painting by hand.

[29]The art historian and curator Robert Hobbs refers to the kind of painting practiced by Lasker and such peers as Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, Mary Heilmann, and David Reed as meta-abstraction.

He also spent time studying the thickly textured Abstract Expressionist canvases of Clyfford Still in the museum's permanent collection, as well the painting House of Cards (1960) by Al Held, which is filled with brightly colored and broadly outlined geometric shapes.

One of the people who saw that show was the art dealer Tony Shafrazi, who invited Lasker to participate in his own gallery's debut group exhibition on Mercer Street in Soho.

[37] In the 1984 exhibition, Fact and Fiction, his work was hung alongside that of Thomas Nozkowski and Gary Stephan, two artists with whom Lasker was having extensive discussions about abstract painting.

Modernists flattened the picture space so that even depicted forms (Klee, Dubuffet, Diebenkorn in his representational period) inhabit a place too shallow to contain more than the outlines of those figures.

By aggressively using paint-as-paint — whose patterns, colors, textures, and facture often seem in pointed opposition to one another — Lasker is paying close attention to, as Judd put it, "the obdurate identity of a material.

[67] The book also contains essays on Eugene Leroy and Willem de Kooning, as well as observations on such subjects as life in New York's East Village and horse racing at Aqueduct Racetrack.

"[69] He does not attempt to manipulate the viewer's interpretation of the work, but instead seeks language that reflects the ambiguity of his images, although he occasionally refers to the process of making the painting, as in Beat the System (1985) and Sensible Arrangement (1995).

Thus I see his work not as an empty, ill-defined 'double' for painting, that is, as part of the current bourgeois anti-art voodoo, but as a true treble to that false double.

In a review of a solo exhibition at the Rose Museum of Brandeis University, he writes: Jonathan Lasker once told me he thought the Minimalists had been trying to make an art without metaphor, and in fact had succeeded; but the point having been proved, he continued, there's no longer an urgent motivation to produce more metaphor-free work.

By reducing (or, perhaps, ennobling) a form to its basics – a gray rectangle, perhaps, that glows on a graph grid – then placing beside it a similar but altered shape whose bold colors give it recrudescent life, Lasker wants us to look at what we ignore, or to imagine what we suppress.