Jonas Wood has been watching sports his whole life, and the habit has followed him into the studio. “I played tons of sports when I was a kid and I was obsessed with following them,” Wood said, speaking with me by Zoom from his Los Angeles studio. “I used to read the entire sports section in the Boston Globe, all the stats and everything.”
When he got out of grad school, Wood wanted to practice portraiture, but was “kind of exhausted trying to find personal subjects—friends, family, myself.” So he started using sports cards and images of basketball and baseball players he grew up with. It was just a way to practice painting the figure.
Tennis arrived more casually—almost by accident—while Wood was watching matches late at night in the studio.
“I remember watching the Australian Open and taking pictures of the TV with my phone,” he told me, occasionally looking off camera to dip his brush in paint. “The lights were off in the studio and the court was just this solid color with these lines cutting through it. I thought, that’s a really interesting painting idea. Everything I do is based on photographs, taking photos, appropriating photos, so I started collecting these images and testing it out.”
In Wood’s paintings the players disappear, the ball vanishes, and what remains is the court itself: bright color, white lines, and a net cutting the image in half.
Jonas Wood, Porsche Tennis Grand Prix, 2025. © Jonas Wood Photo: Marten Elder Courtesy Gagosian
Photo: Marten Elder
Those stripped-down compositions form the basis of Wood’s new exhibition at Gagosian in Beverly Hills, which gathers paintings based on courts from tournaments across the global tennis calendar—ATP, WTA, and Olympic events. Each canvas presents the court from the familiar broadcast vantage point behind the baseline, compressing the playing surface into flat bands of color.
The idea for the new group of paintings had been sitting in Wood’s studio for years.
“I actually wrote myself a note on the wall maybe eight or nine years ago that said something like, ‘All ATP tour stops—one work?’” he said. “If I was going to revisit the tennis paintings seriously, I wanted to really go through the whole tour and see all the differences in the courts—the colors, the sponsors, the signage, all these little variations that I hadn’t explored before.”
About three years ago he decided to follow through. Wood subscribed to the Tennis Channel and began systematically photographing tournament finals as they aired.
“I was watching the ATP and WTA finals, the Olympic finals, and taking screenshots in my studio,” he said. “At some point it became more about capturing the colors and shapes than actually watching the matches. I was building this archive of images and then making collages from them.”
Those collages became the starting point for the paintings in the exhibition. In some works the court appears framed by fragments of Wood’s studio—lights hanging from the ceiling or handwritten notes pinned to the wall.
Jonas Wood, Shanghai Masters, 2025 © Jonas Wood Photo: Marten Elder Courtesy Gagosian
Photo: Marten Elder
“The tennis court is basically three or four bands of color in a rectangle,” Wood said. “That’s very close to something like Albers or other geometric abstraction. So, for me, it became this way to investigate color—balancing these saturated courts against black backgrounds or against other images from my studio. Tennis is the vehicle, but the real question is how to make those colors work together.”
Wood says he’s a tennis fan, though he’s careful not to overstate the role it plays in his life. He mentioned longtime favorites like Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, along with more recent players such as Novak Djokovic and Jannik Sinner.
One of the best pictures in the show is based not on a professional match but rather on a Nintendo tennis game Wood played with his children.
“They’re so seemingly not serious,” he said. “But they’re made very deliberately. I like that people can come to them for different reasons—because they like tennis, because they like color, because they’re interested in painting. It doesn’t have to be one thing.”
As our conversation wrapped up, Wood was still tinkering. He turned a canvas still in the making slightly to show me his progress. It depicted fruit on a table, seen partly from the side so the edge of the plywood panel became part of the composition.
“Painting is kind of athletic in a way,” he said.
