JONAS WOOD AND JOHN MCENROE MEET AT GAGOSIAN BEVERLY HILLS APRIL 25

The room is 3,200 square feet. The ceiling at Gagosian Beverly Hills is 20 feet. Jonas Wood's tennis paintings are large enough to fill the walls without competing. John McEnroe agreed to walk into this room on April 25 and talk about what the courts look like from outside the baseline. That conversation, between a painter who has spent fifteen years studying the geometry of tennis courts and a champion who spent roughly the same amount of time winning on them, is happening on the closing day of Wood's exhibition. It is moderated by Josh Baer of the Baer Faxt. It will air on the podcast later in 2026. Gagosian does not stage these things casually. ## 2011. The Series Begins With One Court. Jonas Wood started painting tennis courts in 2011. Not players. Not action. The courts themselves, rendered from a foreshortened perspective behind the baseline, which is the least heroic view of a tennis match and also the most honest one. From that position, the court is geometry. Red clay grid lines, blue hard court rectangles, green grass stripes. The player is an interruption of the pattern. The series now spans fifteen years and includes the Shanghai Masters (2025), which depicts a television monitor inside Wood's own studio showing a Jannik Sinner and Novak Djokovic match, with the artist's working notes pinned to the wall composition behind the screen. Wood included himself in the picture by including his studio. The court appears twice: on the TV, and in your memory of every other court painting Wood has made. That doubling is what he means by serial abstraction. ## McEnroe Collects. The Overlap Is Real. John McEnroe is not at Gagosian as a tennis legacy endorsement. He collects contemporary art and has done so for decades, including at auction at Christie's and Sotheby's alongside buyers who have no idea who he is. His long-standing passion for the market is documented and consistent. His presence in the Wood conversation is the presence of someone who has felt the geometry of those courts from inside the baseline and who has also stood in a gallery asking what a painting means. That duality is what makes the April 25 conversation worth attending, or eventually worth listening to on the Baer Faxt. Wood will explain the serial abstraction logic of the tennis court paintings: the repetition, the color variation, the refusal to include narrative. McEnroe will explain what it means to look at a court you have won on and see it rendered as pure pattern without a human being in it. Neither perspective is available anywhere else at this scale. ## Gagosian Beverly Hills, April 25, 4pm. Register Through the Bio. The exhibition closes after the conversation. Wood will sign copies of the newly published catalogue. The Baer Faxt, which functions as a primary intelligence layer for the contemporary art market, will carry the conversation forward into the audio archive that the market actually runs on. Gagosian bets on artists the way sports teams bet on players before anyone else sees the trajectory. They gave Wood a show. They paired the closing with McEnroe. The catalogue exists and will appreciate accordingly. Shanghai Masters (2025) will sell through a gallery or an auction house within 24 months of the exhibition closing. That is the placement read, not a prediction. That is the pattern.