Pastels

George Condo's two-part exhibition, Pastels, spanning galleries at both Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth in New York City, offers a glimpse into the artist's creative process and unbound inventiveness through the medium of pastel. Condo's new works challenge the limits of improvisation within this medium—spontaneously deploying gesso, fields of color and dramatic pastel gestures, all without the benefit of preparatory sketches—to express various states of the human psyche. The artist embraces the act of abstraction within a figural framework in novel ways, materializing the fragmented, elusive nature of ineffable thoughts and feelings. Together, these complementary presentations highlight the sui generis power of Condo's oeuvre. The presentation at Hauser & Wirth comprises a new series of puzzle-like portraits, which the artist has dubbed his ‘bizarre characters,' their visages simultaneously splintered and affixed by bright geometric planes. The jagged electricity created by the faceted compositions of these works signals the complex and often conflicted nature of the mind. At Sprüth Magers, Condo presents frenzied color compositions alongside a series of new black-and-white pastels that incorporate deliberate drips and spatters of colored pigment. Here, overlapping and intersecting shapes that might typically suggest figurative elements forego any reference to the human face, emphasizing instead the gesture, line and rhythm of their making. With such titles as Centrifuge, Open Forms, No Direction Home, and Chaotic Combustion, these recent paintings evoke fluidity and tumult—Condo's reflection, perhaps, on his ricocheting innermost feelings and thoughts. Taken together, the works across both locations form a visual essay on the flair and diversity of Condo's draftsmanship, exceptional sense of color, and mastery of any material. George Condo (b. 1957, Concord, New Hampshire) 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, including painters Jiri Georg Dokoupil and Walter Dahn. Condo would soon 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. 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 include the 2013 New York Studio School honor and the 2018 BOMB Magazine Anniversary Gala Honoree. Condo's work appeared in his first solo show in 1983 at the Ulrike Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions have included 'Humanoids' at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco in 2023 and 'The Picture Gallery' in Shanghai in 2021, among others. His works have been presented alongside masterpieces by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Klee, and Giacometti in major art institutions and biennials worldwide.

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