George Condo Inaugurates Hauser & Wirth West Hollywood

Hauser & Wirth have chosen George Condo to inaugurate the opening of their second Los Angeles space in West Hollywood.

The gallery is one of many expanding in L.A. following the recent boom in the Southern California city’s art scene.

Coinciding with Frieze Los Angeles, People Are Strange (15 February–22 April 2023) marks a return for Condo to the West Coast city, where he briefly worked in the early 1980s. It is his first exhibition in L.A. in nearly five years.

Referencing The Doors’ 1967 song of the same title, Condo’s People Are Strange is an eager study of modern life’s dissonant qualities rendered in his signature fragmented style.

Femme Fatale (2022) depicts a bulbous, contorted portrait of a woman. Geometric forms and flat planes of colour are married with heavily layered splashes of paint, inducing both curiosity and repulsion in the viewer.

One of the more intriguing aspects of Condo’s paintings is the way they allude to the chaos of contemporary life. Collapsing form in dramatic hues, Condo deftly merges beauty and madness to show that people are, indeed, strange.

Main image: George Condo, Transformation (2022) (detail). Acrylic, oil stick, and metallic paint on linen. 228.6 x 647.7 cm. © George Condo. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles. Photo: Thomas Barratt.