ART CITIES: N.York-George Condo

The paintings, drawings and sculptural work of George Condo offer a virtuosic examination of a wide range of art-historical idioms, which he transforms into his own visual language. He depicts grotesque, tragicomic and sometimes monstrous subjects with stylistic elements from seventeenth-century Venetian or Dutch painting, but also Cubism, Surrealism and Pop Art.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth Galleries Archive

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—who has been affiliated with the gallery since mounting one of the first solo exhibitions of his career at Galerie Monika Sprüth in 1984—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. For all their copious references, Condo’s paintings are not quotations, pastiches or appropriations. They are products of a painterly project that mines the history of art while simultaneously challenging the justification for contemporary painting. The historically coded, painterly idioms he uses extend from the religious light of the Baroque to the iridescent tones of Florentine cangiante, to techniques he finds in Dürer, Rembrandt or Caravaggio. There is also the vocabulary of modernism and abstraction—echoes of de Kooning’s lines, Matisse’s colors and, of course, Picasso. Yet regardless of the formal vocabulary he uses, be it Old Masters or abstraction, Condo’s choice of subject systematically destroys familiar pictorial structures and demolishes the painting’s semantic field. His oeuvre is like a wild, technically brilliant art historical delirium that reconfigures past and present in a complex synthesis. He himself has termed this process “Artificial Realism.” Condo’s career encompasses not only a variety of formal vocabularies, but also a variety of media, including collage, drawing, and sculpture. Time and again he has returned to the medium of drawing to not only shed new light on the territory between the abstract and the figurative, but also to disrupt preconceived notions about the difference between drawing and painting. Developing a method he calls “psychological Cubism,” he composes his figures and portraits not from the Cubist technique of different perspectives, but rather in a range of simultaneous emotional and psychological states.

* The adjective sui generis is Latin, meaning literally, “of its own kind.” Anything sui generis is its own thing; there’s nothing else like it.

Photo: George Condo, Abstract Male Portrait, 2024, Acrylic, pastel and metallic paint on paper, 203.2 x 198.1 cm / 80 x 78 in, 215.3 x 210.5 x 7 cm / 84 3/4 x 82 7/8 x 2 3/4 in (framed), © George Condo, Photo: Matt Grubb, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Sprüth Magers, Gallery, 22 East 80th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 29/1-1/3/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://spruethmagers.com/ and Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 134 Wooster Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 29/1-12/4/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/