In New York, the Hauser & Wirth and Sprüth Magers galleries offered a rare glimpse of George Condo's impulsive, dynamic and complex approach to the human mind through pastel.
He is one of the most highly-rated American painters on the contemporary art market. Some of his paintings, such as "Force Field" and "Nude and Forms", have achieved record sales of nearly seven million dollars. The Concord, New Hampshire-born, New York-based artist is known for his figurative style, fractured portraits and tormented imagery.
The man who worked with Andy Warhol at the Factory, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and who coined the term "artificial realism", continues to refer to the European heritage from which he drew his inspiration. For the past forty years, his hybrid and abundant works have played with multiforms and metamorphosis, brightly colored highlights and the styles of various art-historical currents, referring to Picasso, Velasquez, Manet, Cézanne, Basquiat... His fame reached its peak in the 1980s and has continued to grow ever since.
Today, and through these two exhibitions, the 68-year-old once again defies the limits of improvisation in his work between matter and pastel, figuration and abstraction, classicism and modernity. Here, he lets psychological states express themselves, always probing different levels of reading, materializing "the fragmented and elusive nature of ineffable thoughts and feelings".
Bizarreries of the mind
The exhibition, split into two parts at Sprüth Magers (Upper East Side) and Hauser & Wirth (SoHo), opened up new perspectives on his creative process, giving free rein to his bold, instinctive gestures. His spontaneous canvases do away with preparatory sketches, playing with layers of gesso and fields of color, for a plunge into the many facets of the human spirit.
Hauser & Wirth presented new puzzle-like portraits. His "bizarre characters", as the artist calls them, highlight internal tensions and transitory emotions, intensified by vivid colors. The fragmented faces, assembled using geometric planes, reflect the complex, elusive and unstructured nature of the mind.
Sprüth Magers, who has represented him since 1984, exhibited frenetic color compositions alongside austere black-and-white pastels last month. Here, he incorporates drips and splashes of colored pigment, where shapes intersect and overlap, moving away from figurative elements. If he abandons all reference to the human face, he places greater emphasis on gesture, line and rhythm. His paintings "Centrifuge", "Open Forms", "No Direction Home" and "Chaotic Combustion" invite the viewer to meditate on fluidity and tumult.
These two complementary exhibitions offered an opportunity to (re)discover George Condo's exacerbated vision of human thought. What's more, they sublimated his mastery of color, his expertise with materials and his profound links between abstraction and figuration. An exhilarating foretaste before the October retrospective at the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris.
George Condo Pastels (Part 1)
January 29 - March 1, 2025
Sprüth Magers
5900 Wilshire Blvd, Los Angeles (USA)
George Condo Pastels (Part 2)
January 29 - April 12, 2025
Hauser & Wirth
134 Wooster Street, New York, USA
