george condo paintings

This survey of three decades of work by George Condo includes about 50 portraits, most of fictional subjects. More Photos »

The American artist George Condo made a splash in New York in the early 1980s with a line of surrealist-style figure paintings. It was tasty, erudite stuff, freaky but classy, a Mixmaster version of old master, with a big glop of Pop tossed in. Then he went to Europe, found an avid audience and stayed for a decade, mostly in Paris. To the New York art world, myopic and memoryless, he might have moved to Mars.

In 1995 he resettled in Manhattan, and has been there since, producing at high volume and exhibiting prominently without generating the kind of main-stage mojo that has made a younger artist like John Currin — who is hugely indebted to Mr. Condo’s example — a star.

But now, finally, and with minimum fanfare, he’s having his first institutional career survey here. It’s titled “George Condo: Mental States.” It’s at the New Museum. And it’s sensational.

It demonstrates, among other things, what anyone who has tracked his career already knows. He’s the missing link, or one of them (Carroll Dunham is another), between an older tradition of fiercely loony American figure painting —Willem de Kooning’s grinning women, Philip Guston’s ground-meat guys, Jim Nutt’s cubist cuties, anything by Peter Saul — and the recent and updated resurgence of that tradition in the work of Mr. Currin, Glenn Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Dana Schutz and others.

Not that Mr. Condo — born in 1957 in New Hampshire — requires historical positioning to justify a survey. One glance at the installation of about 50 of his mainly fictional portraits on the New Museum’s fourth floor tells you otherwise. Some of the paintings are stronger and stranger than others. But covering a long wall up to the ceiling, with no two images alike, they add up to a tour de force of stylistic multitasking and figurative variety.

Your first instinct is to spot sources for those styles and figures: Picasso, Arcimboldo, Cookie Monster, Goya, Looney Tunes. But you only go so far with this because Mr. Condo isn’t much into wholesale appropriation. He’s interested in invention. Everything is pretty much straight from his brain.

The earliest picture in the show, “The Madonna,” dates from 1982 and gives a basic sense of how Mr. Condo works. He painted his subject, a Renaissance staple, straightforwardly, then did something funny to it. He scraped some paint away so that the face became blurred and slightly separated from the head, like a slipping mask. This subtle effect turned a historically and ideologically loaded subject into contemporary caprice, though without taking the history and ideas away. They’re here, but detached, like the Madonna’s face.

Even after being messed around with, she looks fairly normal, which cannot be said of most of the figures surrounding her. These include other quasi-religious images — Mr. Condo grew up as a Roman Catholic — including a Mary Magdalene with bared breasts and sticking-out rodent ears. Taken as an icon it’s deeply bizarre, yet it doesn’t feel entirely irreverent, which makes it even odder.

Various gods of art history get their due and take their licks. The 1994 “Memories ofRembrandt” borrows the tawny palette of that Dutch artist’s late self-portraits but reduces his facial features to a juicy stew of eyeballs and chunks of flesh. Throughout the show pieces of Picasso are everywhere, puzzled together, piled up like kindling, broken up, gnawed on, inserted wherever there’s room. Mr. Condo clearly can’t get enough of him.

News photographs of public personalities have served as models for portraits, and occasionally he leaves these people looking more or less like themselves, as he did a few years back in a series of 15 portraits of Elizabeth II of Britain. One of these images at the New Museum, “The Insane Queen,” is, in its zany way, almost respectful of her. Others — the queen with a detachable chin, a clown smile, a carrot stuck through her head — are not, and landed Mr. Condo in hot water when he brought them to the Tate Modern.

A few paintings, and several gilded bronze heads in the show, are named for characters — “The Barber,” “The Butler,” “The Alcoholic” — in Mr. Condo’s private mythology of cultural types. And then there are portraits that are just mysterious hallucinations, floating free and unrooted.

In “Red Antipodular Portrait” a bug-eyed creature stares out apprehensively from behind cascades of scarlet fur. A kind of Bichon Maltese-Yosemite Sam hybrid, it exists in a one-species universe, unconnected to art or life or history. Yet it gives the impression of having feelings, so it evokes a complicated response: amusement with a tug of empathy. Isn’t empathy going too far? Isn’t this picture just a cartoon? Within the world of Mr. Condo’s portraits, nothing is “just” anything.

Brain Power Natural History Museum

A once-living example of the most complicated object in the universe is mounted in a case at the beginning of the ambitious exhibition “Brain: The Inside Story,” which opens on Saturday at the American Museum of Natural History. And a sorry-looking object it is, if we put aside the symbolism and portentousness that have grown around it, and the research that barely has begun to dissect its innermost workings.Multimedia Slide Show‘Brain:The Inside Story’BlogArtsBeatThe latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.More Arts NewsApproach it without preconceptions and its compressed tubular windings make it seem like a small intestine coiled for easy transport. And this particular organ on display — which undoubtedly once contemplated the world with much curiosity as its observers now do — looks particularly inconsequential and stolid; it was preserved using “plastination silicone technique.”But it is helpful, at times, to see the three-pound human brain as a somewhat bizarre and alien thing. We must use it in order to study it, but it offers very little help. You can’t really peer into it, but it determines how we peer into anything else. For the most part, we can’t even see it or feel it do anything at all. The brain is most visible when it is most strange, for that is when its powers and limitations stand out from the background hum of ordinary experience.There are times, in this exhibition, when that happens, when we must stop and think about the organ that makes us stop and think. There are also, unfortunately, a few too many times when our own brains are put into passive, textbook-reading mode. But the high points stand out. Look at a seemingly random display of colored spools of thread in the first gallery, for example, an art installation by Devorah Sperber. Gaze at that array through a spherical lens and we see that the spools actually create a pixilated and inverted image of the Mona Lisa: a neat demonstration that it isn’t just sensation that the brain processes; sensations are also given shape. In this case, we learn, the “fusiform face area” of the brain, which is utilized for facial recognition, is being put to work.

“Brain: The Inside Story” opens on Saturday and runs through Aug. 14 at the American Museum of Natural History, Central Park West and 79th Street; (212) 769-5100, amnh.org.

via ‘Brain’ Exhibit at American Museum of Natural History – Review – NYTimes.com.

graffiti

It is one of the largest shows of such pieces ever mounted in one place, and many of the contributors are significant figures in both the street-art world and the commercial trade that now revolves around it. Its debut might have been expected to draw critics, art dealers and auction-house representatives, not to mention hordes of young fans. But none of them were invited.

In the weeks since, almost no one has seen the show. The gallery, whose existence has been a closely guarded secret, closed on the same night it opened.

Known to its creators and participating artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show’s artworks remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene. Collectors can’t buy the art. The public can’t see it. And the only people with a chance of stumbling across it are the urban explorers who prowl the city’s hidden infrastructure or employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

That’s because the exhibition has been mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station. The dank, cavernous hall feels a lot farther than it actually is from the bright white rooms of Chelsea’s gallery district. Which is more or less the point: This is an art exhibition that goes to extremes to avoid being part of the art world, and even the world in general.

The show’s curators, street artists themselves, unveiled the project for a single night, leading this reporter on a two-and-a-half hour tour. Determined to protect their secrecy, they offered the tour on condition that no details that might help identify the site be published, not even a description of the equipment they used to get in and out. And since they were (and remain) seriously concerned about the threat of prosecution, they agreed only to the use of street-artist pseudonyms.

Workhorse, in his late 30s, is a well-known street artist with gallery representation; PAC, younger by a decade, is less established but familiar (under a different name) to followers of urban-art blogs. The two came up with the idea for the Underbelly Project in 2008, a few years after PAC first saw the old station, led to it from a functioning one by an urban explorer acquaintance.

Abandoned stations like this — and there are a fair number of them in the city — are irresistible to those who search out hidden spaces in the city, despite or perhaps because of the fact that being there is illegal and potentially dangerous. PAC too found himself compelled after that first visit, and he began going back sporadically.

Seduced by the Abandoned

The place was pitch black, but standing with a powerful flashlight on a platform, PAC said, he had been able to make out a landscape of several more platforms, each lined with rows of columns, alternating with sunken track beds. The station, about the size of a football field, had clearly never been completed: no track had been laid in those beds, no escalators or staircases met the gaping holes in the platforms, and there was no electricity.

“I would hang out here for hours,” PAC said, enjoying “the solitude of being underground” and the architecture.

Then he met Workhorse, whose art often focuses on abandoned spaces.

“I told him I knew about a space that was pretty cool,” PAC said, and “brought him down here, and that night the idea for the project hatched.”

The difficult process of getting to the Underbelly space — which involves waiting at an active station’s platform until it’s empty, slipping from it into the damp and very dirty no man’s land beyond, and traversing that to get to the old station’s entrance — suggested to PAC and Workhorse how challenging the project would be. And the legal risks were obvious. Charles F. Seaton, a spokesman for New York City Transit, described such incursions as “trespassing, punishable by law,” and said “anyone caught defacing M.T.A. property is subject to arrest and fine.” Beyond that, Workhorse and PAC worried that given anxiety about terrorism in the subway, a large-scale, long-term project like theirs might even lead to more serious charges.

via ‘Underbelly Project’ Hidden Art Show in Abandoned Subway Station – NYTimes.com.

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The Real Work of Art

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What could be better than another great show at Paul Kasmin ?? How about two at the same time…

I have seen a lot of great stuff at Paul Kasmin , both in their main gallery and also in the smaller gallery across the street. They tend to show good solid work and they are very smart about HOW the work is shown, which is just as important.

During the summer galleries tend to show more group or across the board shows, which are nice but what’s even better is when you have two galleries and you can show a group type show and also showcase another interesting individual artist as well.

Process and abstraction is just a good collection of excellent quality work which as you might guess had to do with the art making process. Not a lot to figure out here, but very cool to look at.

Across the street however is the KENT HENRICKSEN exhibit called A VENOMOUS BLOOM. ….

What I love here is the whole room becomes the art. It’s a total sensory experience. The paintings are a little frighting and the snakes are sort of ominous and yet the whole thing is very luxurious at the same time. I’m attracted and repelled , my favorite state to be in… maybe that’s why I like scary movies so much… hmmm . While I was checking this out there were people who walked in and walked right out. I didn’t understand. Are people really that turned off by snakes ?  I like snakes as long as they are not in my bed with me and or angry, but you can’t deny the art is beautiful. Anyways – this is another summer recommendation … drop by for a minute or 5 , which is about how long it takes to see this little spot. It’s worth it …   Click here to go to the Paul Kasmin Site

One of my favorite galleries is Stux Gallery in Chelsea. They have an edgy mixture of programing that is always intelligent , interesting and timely. There is a certain aesthetic I love there and that I relate to having spent so much time in Los Angeles, the city where I believe my soul is from, even though at present I identify as a New Yorker.

I had been waiting to write about something I really like there and this exhibit is the perfect opportunity. I usually go back to my locker at the gym after doing the galleries on Thursdays and I even overheard someone talking about the show ., in the locker room, with the paintings with “the eyes.” I knew they were speaking about this show, the “eyes” paintings are arresting and dreamy at the same time.

The individual works in the show are great on there own, they have a very forward , dark hip look without hitting you over the head with any of these characteristics, but what impressed me more about the show is that this really makes the first time , that I have seen an art exhibit that deals with the Middle East Crisis in a way that seems appropriate for artists and curators to address it.

I mean it just doesn’t make sense to me to go to galleries that are selling expensive artworks to people who have the money to buy them , and see these angry artworks by american artists about this subject. It would be a different story if the artworks were by angry people from the Middle East , that would seem more meaningful to me, but you don’t need to tell me or the art going public at large that invading the middle east and war and oil etc etc etc are all bad. Most of us going to see art are educated and generally open minded and liberal thinking , at least to some extent, and have come to this conclusion on our own.

Some of these kinds of artworks seem to me to turn into a real low brow attempt to get people to notice the art, kind of like 911 artworks for sale on the street.

Barakat: The Gift at Stux Gallery , is not like this at all. This is an artistically felt response to the stimulation and information that is changing our world because of this sad and hostile political climate. I admit , I did not do all the reading while at the gallery about the specific theme of the show , I don’t always find this necessary as I am often able to read artworks without the assistance of words, so the exact meaning of the gift I do not know, but the exhibit made me reflect on the inherent , inevitable cultural exchange that happens between two countries at war and sparked my interest in an aesthetic that has feet in both places at once, which is really what the role of art is.

I want to share with you another work of art that deals with this subject. It is an ongoing , what I would call installation piece, that may not be intended to be art , but really is in my book . It’s called Arlington West Santa Monica . Click on the link to check it out and go see the show at Stux Gallery.