History brims with artist couples: Surrealists Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, modern masters Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe and abstract expressionists Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. The latest twosome to join the international art circuit is Los Angeles painter Jonas Wood and his potter wife, Shio Kusaka. Together, they are helping to redefine creative collaboration.
Mr. Wood, 37, and Ms. Kusaka, 42, don’t merely work alongside each other in a shared studio. They continually refer to each other’s works in their own: Mr. Wood’s still-life interiors often include rows of striped and speckled pots and planters that echo Ms. Kusaka’s ceramics. Ms. Kusaka, in turn, often mimics images from his canvases—from his signature plants to basketballs—on her pots.
Now the couple’s overlapping oeuvres are getting an in-depth look for the first time in a Gagosian Gallery show in Hong Kong, “Jonas Wood and Shio Kusaka: Blackwelder,” up through Feb. 28. The show includes 10 paintings and 25 drawings by Mr. Wood and 53 pots by Ms. Kusaka, many of which haven’t been seen before.