Frye Salon + Jonathan Lasker

Frye Salon is both a fixture and a living experiment—an ever-evolving installation that invites fresh perspectives on the museum’s founding-era collection. The gallery features more than one hundred paintings in a floor-to-ceiling presentation mode known as “salon style,” recalling the striking displays once found in Charles and Emma Frye’s First Hill home. Installed in a purpose-built gallery attached to their house, the couples’ art shared space with music, conversation, and community. Today, that same spirit of layered meaning and lively exchange continues to inform all that we do at the Frye. 

The museum periodically places living artists in direct dialogue with this dynamic salon-style installation. In Frye Salon + Jonathan Lasker, a selection of large canvases by the contemporary American painter—subject of the concurrent exhibition Drawings and Studies—intermingle with the featured collection works. Known for his bold visual language of biomorphic forms and distinctive use of line, Lasker uses the familiar tools of representational painting—figure and ground, space and perspective—to destabilize the dividing line with abstraction. Situated among the works of Frye Salon, his vibrant, evocatively titled compositions open unexpected conversations across time, style, and painterly intent.