George Condo, Skarstedt & Simon Lee Galleries

This Spring London’s W1 gallery district sees a two-part exhibition of psychologically affecting ink and pastel works by one of contemporary art’s greatest living masters:  renowned New Yorker George Condo. This is his first London solo show since the Hayward Gallery’s critically acclaimed Condo: Mental States retrospective in 2011. 

Split across the Skarstedt and Simon Lee Galleries – within 5 minutes’ walk of each other in Old Bond Street and Berkeley Street – this is a two part survey of Condo’s past 6 months’ work: a series of unflinching studies of human personalities through portraiture, and an Cubist-esque effort to collapse split, multiplicitous emotional states onto a single physical plane.

The gruesome monochromes of the Part One (Ink Drawings, the Skarstedt Gallery) strike a dramatic minor chord compared with the technicolour, tragicomic works at the Hayward in 2011. The two-room space is dominated by eleven huge ink-on-paper portraits, depicting  in brooding umbrous blues a series of ‘characters’ Condo claims to have been working with since the mid- to late 1990s. 

These deformed, hallucinatory figures (take a look at The Discarded Human [2013] to see what we mean), half serene and half poised to howl, are personifications of a degraded humanity inspired by Aldous Huxley’s 1956 essay Heaven and Hell. Having spent 20 years grappling them onto canvas, Condo describes these deeply absorbing gesso/ink works as the ‘last variations’ of characters struggling to reclaim conventional human form.

Part Two, Headspace at the Simon Lee Gallery, is a burst of vivid light by comparison. Eleven huge, fragmented, pastel and primary-colour mugshot paintings fill - and seem to sprawl out beyond - the canvas space: all teeth, wide-eyes and screeching mouths. Condo calls this ‘Psychological Cubism’:  an attempt to voice to three or four sides of a split, conflicting personality at the same time. The portraits are androgynous, compared to the Ink Drawings’ revelry in female sexuality, and see facial features transformed into a punchy, vicious physical language of hysteria.

These two shows are a complicated, fascinating psychological study of the multiple and split personalities that reside in each of us. This is a great chance to take in new work by one of America’s greatest contemporary painters – in the exclusive surrounds of two unusually low-key galleries.