Opening on 25 September 2021, Long Museum (West Bund) presents the largest solo exhibition by George Condo in Asia, ‘The Picture Gallery.’ It will bring together more than 150 paintings made throughout the artist’s career and will debut a new series of large-scale canvases made specifically for this presentation.
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, the exhibition focuses on some of the most important cycles and bodies of works that have defined Condo’s art since the late 1970s, when the artist was among the first to herald a critical return to painting after decades of conceptual art practices.
Organized according to series and cycles – and including many rarely seen works along with some of the artist’s most celebrated paintings – the exhibition underscores Condo’s fascination with the world of music and of melodrama in particular. This interest has led him to collaborations with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, for which he created the monumental sculpture Constellation of Voices, now permanently installed at Lincoln Center. Condo has also created record album covers for hip hop musicians like Kanye West and Travis Scott and has worked with the contemporary composer Matthias Pintscher on a new work for solo violin, recently performed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
As suggested by its title – borrowed from a 2002 painting – the exhibition is conceived as a gallery of imaginary portraits: a salon of fictional ancestors and fallen members of an imagined aristocracy hung in the cavernous galleries of Long Museum (West Bund) as in the halls of a decaying futurist castle.
