GEORGE CONDO:
PEOPLE ARE STRANGE AT HAUSER & WIRTH WEST HOLLYWOOD
15 February
2023 – 22 April 2023
Los
Angeles...On 15 February, Hauser and Wirth is pleased to announce that George
Condo will inaugurate the newly established West Hollywood gallery with his
first exhibition in LA in nearly five years.
With the exhibition’s title ‘People Are Strange,’ taken from
the hit 1967 song of the same name by legendary – and quintessentially Los
Angeles – band The Doors, Condo’s latest canvases are filled with fragmented
portraits and abstractions. In these large-scale works, the artist renders
layered, vibrating planes, lines and geometries that suggest a world of
oppositional forces and states, at once solemn and euphoric, connected and
entropic, logical and ineffable, beautiful and ugly. In their ability to convey
deep contradictions through Condo’s mastery of the medium of painting, the
canvases on view painted in New York City over the past year and a half are a
reconstructive body of work involving both harsh lines and melodic painterly
passages – and which characterize the dividing forces of modern life
everywhere.
Condo has said that the exhibition’s title, ‘People Are
Strange,’ references ‘the effect of the divisive politics of our time that have
created a fractured society. In these works I put together the broken pieces
and fragmented aspects of that division to intentionally point out the
question: is it that people are strange or is it the politicians that are in
fact strange, thus resulting in a maelstrom of dehumanized and disenchanted
people who as a result have become strange….even to themselves.’
‘People Are Strange’ offers impressions of the strange world
around him and, in doing so, captures something universal about the
transforming effects of time’s passage as it pertains to the time-lapse we have
all lived through during the pandemic.
Exhibition details
Filling the sweeping expanse of Hauser & Wirth’s new
West Hollywood gallery, housed in a 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival building
redolent of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the works on view present Condo’s latest
explorations in scale and the painterly process. While seemingly disparate upon
first glance, these new paintings are united by a central theme of
transformation: they succeed in representing temporality both in the built-up,
layered stages of their construction, and in the chimerical effects of the
figures that inhabit them. Each work embodies its own logical chaos, at once
disorderly and intact, which speaks to the fractured nature of our contemporary
moment and indirectly references the ever-changing conflicts in the world.
According to Condo, the artist is uniquely equipped to translate the ineffable
effects of time, acknowledging that ‘the transformation of society and people
is something we all feel but that a painter can actually show.’
A centerpiece of the exhibition, the large-scale triptych
‘Transformation’ (2022) will be visible to passersby through the large plate
glass windows that front the gallery’s storied stretch of Santa Monica
Boulevard. The frenetic energy of the work is echoed in this vivid tableau,
which features a frenzied picture of undulating forms punctuated by the interaction
of figures coalescing and diverging on the surface of the canvas. Condo’s
subject is the effects of increasing isolation that pulls individuals away from
one another, fraying and fracturing community and society. The amount of time
required to create such a work – the ongoing process of laying down line and
color, and of removing, adding, repeating the process – is more consuming than
the final images might suggest. Time itself thus becomes a material and a
central theme of the show.
Inspired by the way literature can track the passage of time
and its effects on the reader, Condo has created a trio of large-scale
portraits of female muses, erudite and canonical. Each of these is dominated by
a color that conveys mood with an iconographic intensity. For example,
‘Transitional Portrait in Turquoise and Gold’ (2022) depicts within its single
frame, where the image is read from left to right, the collapsing of time in
the passage of a life. The effect of the work is that of a time-lapse film.
Condo observes, ‘The irony is, that as we age, we get younger in our minds and
spirits, even though the external view of us is completely different than
what’s in our heads. The tragic and the beautiful come together when perceived
from the perspective of the viewer.’
Condo’s embrace of the possibilities of paint to record the
passage of time is further extended into three-dimensional form with the debut
of the new sculpture ‘Constellation II’ (2022). A variation of ‘Constellation
for Voices’ (2019), his monumental 11-foot-tall sculpture installed at Lincoln
Center in New York City, this work similarly comprises a multifaceted gold head
that fuses human and alien parts into a single composition – a dialectical
harmonization of differing forms. Simultaneously evoking ancient deities and
modern man, ‘Constellation II’ collages a group of angles and forms together in
a such way that the final fixed object vibrates as if animated. By reaching for
an effect that the artist describes as ‘spatial and ethereal and galactic,’ ‘Constellation
II’ presents viewers with the notion that limitlessness and a lack of fixity
are, for better and for worse, the human condition.
Concurrent with the exhibition at Hauser & Wirth West
Hollywood, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City will present
‘Entrance to the Mind: Drawings by George Condo,’ featuring 28 works on paper
that provide a unique overview of Condo’s drawing practice over the last 45
years. This March in Europe, an exhibition titled ‘Humanoids,’ curated by
Didier Ottinger, will be held at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco – Villa
Paloma.
TRANSITIONAL
PORTRAIT IN TURQUOSE AND GOLD 2022
Acrylic and
Metallic Paint and oil stick on Linen
Dimensions: 300.7 ×267.3×3.8 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
PSYCO 2022
Oil on Linen
Dimensions: 228.6 ×215.9 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
FEMME FATALE 2022
Oil on Linen
Dimensions: 215.9 ×228.6 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
TRANSITIONAL
PORTRAIT IN BLUE AND WHITE 2022
Acrylic and
Oil stick on Linen
Dimensions: 300.4 ×267.3×3.2 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
THE RUNAWAY 2022
Oil on Linen
Dimensions: 215.9 ×228.6 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
ABSTRACT PORTRAIT COMPOSITION 2022
Oil on Linen
Dimensions: 217.2 ×228.6 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
CONSTELLATION
2022
Aluminium, Gold Leaf
Ed. of 10, 2 AP
78.7 x 55.3 x 52.7 cm
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
ABOUT HAUSER
& WIRTH
Hauser & Wirth was
founded in 1992 in Zurich by Iwan Wirth, Manuela Wirth and Ursula Hauser, who
were joined in 2000 by Partner and President Marc Payot and CEO Ewan Venters in
2020. A family business with a global outlook, Hauser & Wirth has expanded
over the past 30 years to include outposts in Hong Kong, London, New York,
Southampton, Los Angeles, Somerset, Menorca, Monaco, Zurich, Gstaad, and St.
Moritz. The gallery represents over 90 artists and estates who have been
instrumental in shaping its identity, and who are the inspiration for Hauser
& Wirth’s diverse range of activities that engage with art, education,
conservation, and sustainability.
Hauser & Wirth
has built a reputation for its dedication to artists and support of visionary
artistic projects worldwide. In addition to presenting a dynamic schedule of
exhibitions, the gallery collaborates with renowned curators to present museum
quality surveys and invests considerable resources in new scholarship and
research. Since its earliest days, the gallery has mounted historically
significant exhibitions. The inaugural exhibition in 1992 took place at Hauser
& Wirth’s first gallery, located in the first-floor apartment of an Art
Deco villa in the heart of Zurich; it united mobiles and gouaches by Alexander
Calder with sculptures and paintings by Joan Miró. Since then, the gallery has
continued to forge an academically rigorous, ambitious program of historic
exhibitions, providing a natural home for a number of major 20th-century
European and American artist estates, and encouraging a continued and engaging
discourse around their oeuvres. These include Louise Bourgeois, The Estate of
Philip Guston, The Eva Hesse Estate, Allan Kaprow Estate, Mike Kelley
Foundation for the Arts, The Estate of Jason Rhoades, Dieter Roth Estate and
The Estate of David Smith.
https://www.hauserwirth.com/about/
DREAMSCAPE 2022
Oil and Wax
Crayon on Linen
Dimensions: 216.5 ×228.9 ×3.2 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
SNOWSTORM 2022
Acrylic Oil
Stick and Metallic Paint on Linen
Dimensions: 208.3 ×213.4 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
AM I HUMAN ? 2022
Oil on Linen
Dimensions: 215.9 ×228.6 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
INTERACTION 2022
Oil on Linen
Dimensions: 215.9 ×228.6 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
INSANITY 2022
Oil and
Crayon on Linen
Dimensions: 215.9 ×228.6 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
HEAVY METAL PROFILE 2022
Oil on Linen
Dimensions: 215.9 ×228.6 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
TRANSFORMATION 2022
Acrylic Oil
Stick and Metallic Paint on Linen
Dimensions: 228.6 ×647.7 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
TRANSITIONAL
PORTRAIT IN PINK AND GREEN 2022
Acrylic and
Metallic Paint and Oil Stick on Linen
Dimensions: 300 ×266.7×3.2 cm.
©2023 Hauser & Wirth
GEORGE CONDO
Born in Concord, New
Hampshire in 1957, George Condo lives and works in New York City. He studied
Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell,
where he became particularly inspired by a course on Baroque and Rococo
painting. He moved to Boston and played in a punk band, ‘The Girls;’ relocated
to New York, where he worked as a printer for Andy Warhol; and spent a year
studying Old Master glazing techniques in Los Angeles. During his first trip to
Europe in 1983, Condo connected with the anarchic Mülheimer Freiheit group in
Cologne which included painters Jiri Georg Dokoupil and Walter Dahn.
Condo would soon go on to spend a decade in Europe: in 1985 he moved to Paris
and did not return to New York permanently until 1995, with the birth of his
second child. During this period, Condo invented his hallmark ‘artificial
realism’ and made his first foray into sculpture. Firmly rooted back in New
York, he received his first major award, the Academy Award in Art from the
American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1999, followed by the Francis J.
Greenberger Award in 2005. Further accolades for this constant innovator would
follow: Condo was a 2013 honoree of the New York Studio School alongside writer
Musa Mayer and poet Bill Berkson, and BOMB Magazine’s 2018 Anniversary Gala
Honoree.
Condo had his
first solo show in 1983 at the Ulrike Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles. Since
then, his work has appeared in a number of solo exhibitions. In 2017 a
retrospective of Condo’s works on paper, ‘The Way I Think,’ traveled
internationally from The Phillips Collection, Washington DC to the Louisiana
Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. In a large-scale exhibition one year
prior, ‘Confrontation’ at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Museum Berggruen in
Berlin, Germany, work by Condo was presented alongside some of his major art
historical reference points: masterpieces by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Klee,
and Giacometti. Condo’s portraiture was the subject of the 2011 – 2012 ‘Mental
States,’ a mid-career survey exhibition which traveled from the New Museum, New
York to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, Hayward
Gallery, London, United Kingdom, and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany; and
the 2005 ‘One Hundred Women. Retrospective’ shown at the Museum of Modern Art,
Salzburg, Austria, and Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany.
In addition to appearing
in solo and group exhibitions, Condo’s work has been honored with inclusion in
Biennials in the United States and abroad. In 2019 he participated in the 58th
Venice Biennale’s ‘May You Live In Interesting Times.’ His work was also
exhibited in the Venice Biennale six years prior, in 2013. Other biennials in
which Condo has participated include the 13th Biennale de Lyon in 2015, the 10th
Gwangju Biennale in 2014, the 2010 and 1987 iterations of the Whitney Biennial,
and the 48th Corcoran Biennial in Washington DC in 2005. Condo’s work can be
found in renowned public collections internationally, including: Art Gallery of
Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway;
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation,
Athens, Greece; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, Spain; Staedel Museum,
Frankfurt, Germany; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; The Broad Collection,
Los Angeles CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY; The Museum of
Modern Art, New York NY; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; and the Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York NY.
You may click above link to read more about George Condo ….
