Hauser & Wirth Gallery to Debut in WeHo with George Condo Exhibition

Hauser & Wirth Gallery is having its grand debut in the City of West Hollywood. The gallery’s second location in Los Angeles County at 8980 Santa Monica Boulevard, is opening February 15, 2023, with an exhibition by artist George Condo, titled “People Are Strange”

Condo’s exhibition takes its name from the 1967 song by The Doors and features new paintings filled with fragmented portraits and abstractions. The large-scale works reflect LA’s contradictions with vibrating planes, lines, and geometries that suggest a world of opposites and convey deep contradictions through Condo’s mastery of painting. The works on view embody the incongruities and seductive power for which Los Angeles is known.

Located in West Hollywood’s LGBT Rainbow District, the gallery’s forthcoming space will occupy the site of former Heritage Classics Motorcar Company, a vintage automobile sales showroom where a white stucco façade and red tile roofing typify the distinctive 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival style of Hollywood’s Golden Age. The structure has been preserved while the interior has been transformed into a 6,000 square foot exhibition space by architect Annabelle Selldorf of Selldorf Architects.

‘People Are Strange’ finds Condo offering up impressions of the strange world around him and, in doing so, capturing something universal about the human condition and the transforming effects of time’s passage.

The exhibition is free to attend. No advance booking necessary.

Born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1957, George Condo 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 which included painters Jiri Georg Dokoupil and Walter Dahn.

Condo would soon go on to 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. Firmly rooted back 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 for this constant innovator would follow: Condo was a 2013 honoree of the New York Studio School alongside writer Musa Mayer and poet Bill Berkson, and BOMB Magazine’s 2018 Anniversary Gala Honoree.

Find his full bio below:
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/26942-george-condo/