US painter George Condo holds his largest Asian showcase

Artist George Condo, renowned for figurative and abstract works, is holding his largest exhibition in Asia at the Long Museum West Bund in Shanghai. The exhibition by Condo, from the United States, will run until Nov 28.

George Condo: The Picture Gallery showcases more than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings by the 64-year-old. Show curator Massimiliano Gioni arranged the artworks according to series and cycles, presenting the most celebrated paintings by Condo alongside some works that are rarely seen.

Gioni led journalists on a virtual tour via an online meeting on Sept 25 as he and Condo are unable to travel to China due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The title of the exhibition was borrowed from a painting of the artist in 2002, according to Gioni.

"The exhibition was 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 the Long Museum, as in the halls of a decaying futurist castle," says Gioni.

Born in 1957 in New Hampshire, Condo began learning to draw when he was 4. He later studied art history and music theory for two years at the University of Massachusetts and eventually became fascinated with Baroque and Rococo paintings. Encouraged by a professor to pursue his true passion for painting, Condo quit university but later realized he was more likely to succeed in music rather than art.

Condo soon joined the rock band The Girls in Boston and, in 1979, met Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Neo-Expressionist star of the 1980s New York art scene. Basquiat, at the time, was in a band, Gray, that was the opening act for Condo's group at a nightclub in Manhattan. Condo and Basquiat hit it off immediately, and the latter quickly convinced Condo to move to New York. Together with Basquiat and US artist Keith Haring, Condo became a central figure in the East Village art scene.

By the early 1980s, Condo's approach to painting combined influences from Cubism, Surrealism and other 20th century avant-garde movements with cartoon characters and vernacular imagery, inaugurating a new kind of figuration, which the artist defined as "artificial realism".