Renowned American artist George Condo has just inaugurated the newly established West Hollywood Hauser & Wirth space gallery in People Are Strange, an exhibition of new paintings. With the exhibition’s title 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, suggesting a world of oppositional forces and states, at once connected and entropic, logical and ineffable, beautiful and ugly.
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.
"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," Condo says.
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."
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."
