George Condo’s two-part exhibition, Pastels, spanning galleries at both Sprüth Magers and Hauser and Wirth in New York City, offers a glimpse into the artist’s creative process and unbound inventiveness through the medium of pastel. Condo’s new works challenge the limits of improvisation within this medium—spontaneously deploying gesso, fields of color, and dramatic pastel gestures, all without the benefit of preparatory sketches—to express various states of the human psyche. The artist embraces the act of abstraction within a figural framework in novel ways, materializing the fragmented, elusive nature of ineffable thoughts and feelings.

Together, these complementary presentations highlight the sui generis power of Condo’s oeuvre. The presentation at Hauser and Wirth comprises a new series of puzzle-like portraits, which the artist has dubbed his “bizarre characters”, their visages simultaneously splintered and affixed by bright geometric planes. The jagged electricity created by the faceted compositions of these works signals the complex and often conflicted nature of the mind.

At Sprüth Magers, Condo—who has been affiliated with the gallery since mounting one of the first solo exhibitions of his career at Galerie Monika Sprüth in 1984—presents frenzied color compositions alongside a series of new black-and-white pastels that incorporate deliberate drips and spatters of colored pigment. Here, overlapping and intersecting shapes that might typically suggest figurative elements forego any reference to the human face, emphasizing instead the gesture, line and rhythm of their making. With such titles as Centrifuge, Open forms, No direction home, and Chaotic combustion, these recent paintings evoke fluidity and tumult—Condo’s reflection, perhaps, on his ricocheting innermost feelings and thoughts.

Taken together, the works across both locations form a visual essay on the flair and diversity of Condo’s draftsmanship, exceptional sense of color, and mastery of any material.

George Condo (b. 1957, Concord, NH) lives in New York. Selected solo exhibitions include Nouveau Musée National de Monaco - Villa Paloma (2023), The Morgan Library & Museum, New York (2023), Long Museum, Shanghai (2021), Cycladic Art Museum, Athens and Maritime Museum, Hong Kong (both 2018), Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2017, traveled to Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Museum Berggruen, Berlin (2016), New Museum, New York (2010), traveled to Hayward Gallery, London (2011), Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2012) and Kunstmuseum Luzern (2008). Selected group exhibitions include Venice Biennale (2019, 2013), 13th Biennale de Lyon (2015), 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014), Whitney Biennial (2010, 1987) and the 48th Corcoran Biennial, Washington DC (2005).