Expanded Portrait Compositions is the first major exhibition by American artist George Condo in Hong Kong. Showcasing a brand-new body of paintings and works on paper that have been created by Condo specifically for the Maritime Museum in Hong Kong, the exhibition will be on view for two weeks only, from March 27 through April 6, 2018.
Coinciding with the sixth edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, Expanded Portrait Compositions will be comprised of eight paintings on canvas and five works on paper that display the artist’s unique method of integrating myriad techniques of drawing and painting into singular artworks. Incorporating the dynamic speed of action painting as well as the methodical layering of dense pigments in various media, Condo’s recent portraits of single and multiple figures present a bold view of humanity in a state of psychological cubism, reconfigured faces and abstracted bodies which exploded out of the picture frame in a chaotic charge of manic energy. Condo’s bold gestural lines of oil pigment stick, acrylic and metallic paint and pastel create a tour-de force of painting, an expression that raucously shifts between abstraction and figuration all at once in bold and surprising new ways.
With a recent focus on multiple mediums over the last decade that accentuates the artist’s mastery of color and texture, these new works are a true representation of this direction in full force. As his method of picture making has become increasingly complex and daring, Condo’s experience with line has altered his portrait paintings: now, the electrified colors and the use of black outline to delineate space and form is noticeably more prominent in these works. In effect, Condo is using the materiality of paint to recreate the immateriality of the human psyche.
© 2018 Hong Kong Maritime Museum
