Jonathan Tucker’s work inhabits the space between sculpture and painting. Using acrylic paint and modeling paste – a combination of acrylic polymer and marble dust – Tucker brushes, pours and casts to form shapes that he assembles and then paints.

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Tucker received a MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. He lives and works in New York City.

Recent exhibitions include Elizabeth Harris Gallery (solo), Lombard Fried Gallery, The New Museum, and Bravin Post Lee, White Columns, New York, NY and Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA.

My interest is in exploring the figurative and spatial qualities of paint itself. I would like to bring together the two poles of painting: the idea of paint as paint (an exploration of the properties of paint) and the other extreme – narrative and representation.

I sculpt modeling paste in a wide range of painted objects. This painting event (pushed-around, wet, white, modeling paste) dries hard, then it is painted, sometimes in a highly detailed way, where simplification and abstraction are as likely an outcome as precise representation. The exaggerated emphasis of paint as form can resemble both landscape and figure, depending on how it is painted.

My work, which sometimes looks like strange nature, takes the fakeness of painting as a given – illusion and form are given equal billing so one can move past, while fully conscious of them.