US painter George Condo holds his largest Asian showcase

Artist George Condo, renowned for figurative and abstract works, is holding his largest exhibition in Asia at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai. The exhibition by Condo, from the United States, will run until Nov 28.

George Condo: The Picture Gallery showcases more than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings by the 64-year-old. Show curator Massimiliano Gioni arranged the artworks according to series and cycles, presenting the most celebrated paintings by Condo alongside some works that are rarely seen.

Gioni led journalists on a virtual tour via an online meeting on Sept 25 as he and Condo are unable to travel to China due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The title of the exhibition was borrowed from a painting of the artist in 2002, according to Gioni.

"The exhibition was conceived as a gallery of imaginary portraits: a salon of fictional ancestors and fallen members of an imagined aristocracy hung in the cavernous galleries of the Long Museum, as in the halls of a decaying futurist castle," says Gioni.

Born in 1957 in New Hampshire, Condo began learning to draw when he was 4. He later studied art history and music theory for two years at the University of Massachusetts and eventually became fascinated with Baroque and Rococo paintings. Encouraged by a professor to pursue his true passion for painting, Condo quit university but later realized he was more likely to succeed in music rather than art.

Condo soon joined the rock band The Girls in Boston and, in 1979, met Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Neo-Expressionist star of the 1980s New York art scene. Basquiat, at the time, was in a band, Gray, that was the opening act for Condo's group at a nightclub in Manhattan. Condo and Basquiat hit it off immediately, and the latter quickly convinced Condo to move to New York. Together with Basquiat and US artist Keith Haring, Condo became a central figure in the East Village art scene.

By the early 1980s, Condo's approach to painting combined influences from Cubism, Surrealism and other 20th century avant-garde movements with cartoon characters and vernacular imagery, inaugurating a new kind of figuration, which the artist defined as "artificial realism".

Condo has since developed outstanding painting skills and virtuosity, enabling him to take on and simulate any historical painting style. In his vast creation, "fake old masters' paintings" coexist with his explorations of the human psyche, while figuration and abstraction are woven into tapestries of signs and symbols that find inspiration in the work of writers and musicians, according to Wang Wei, founding director of the Long Museum in Shanghai.

A new cycle titled the Blue Paintings was especially created for the Long Museum, says the curator. This series plays with musical references ranging from blues music to free jazz.

"The Blue Paintings for me are about finding a way to combine techniques and improvisation, knowledge and freedom," Condo wrote about this series. "I think that, as a painter, you use everything you have to make the best thing you can possibly make."

While acknowledging that "so much of contemporary art is about de-skilling", Condo believes artists should not take the technique as a negative.

"You have to use all you've got to break free from your patterns, so that you are breaking the form into which you would be trapped. I paint through and against techniques," he says.

Condo has exhibited his works around the world and twice participated in the La Biennale di Venezia in 2013 and 2019.

His creations have been featured in venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada, Centre Pompidou in France, and Tate Modern in Britain.

If you go

George Condo: The Picture Gallery

Sept 26-Nov 28

10 am-5:30 pm, Tue-Sun

The Long Museum West Bund 3398 Longteng Avenue, Xuhui district, Shanghai

021-6422-7636