George Condo Mines the Beautiful and the Strange at Hauser & Wirth’s New West Hollywood Gallery

Whatever else can be said about Los Angeles, it is a city in love with paradox. Just consider Hauser & Wirth’s recently opened L.A. gallery—housed in a vintage auto showroom on West Hollywood’s iconic Santa Monica Boulevard—where the 1930s Spanish Colonial Revival’s stucco façade currently frames the colorful and kinetic nude forms of “People Are Strange,” a selection of new works by artist George Condo.

“The real beauty of this space is the windows on Santa Monica Boulevard,” says Stacen Berg, the gallery’s executive director. “There were tens of thousands of people driving by or stuck in traffic who used to look in and see these exotic foreign cars, and now you see these beautiful paintings. So we did orient the show with that in mind.”

Entering the space, I seem to hear the tripping drums and piano of the Doors’ “People Are Strange” as I see a woman in a ruby flamenco dress power walk past a man in gym clothes, leaning against a graffitied building as his bulldog does its business on a nearby hydrant. The surprise, of course, is that this scene—which teems with L.A.’s particular brand of well-heeled bizarreness—wasn’t painted by a native Angeleno, but by an artist most often associated with the city he lives and works in, New York. 

Yet George Condo has never been an artist easily pinned down. Born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957, he studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts before spending the subsequent decades in cities across Europe and the U.S. Likewise, the artist’s overall oeuvre can’t be defined by one genre, or—considering his stint as a bassist for the ’70s punk band The Girls—even a single art form. Comparing his process to British artist Francis Bacon’s, Condo says, “When you throw a number down on a roulette table, the ball spins…and all within a matter of seconds, you’re either a winner or you’re a loser. And the way I’m throwing paint onto these canvases, it’s either a win or a loss, and I love that kind of challenge when it comes to painting.”

As for the work in his Hauser & Wirth show, the artist says his inspiration was as spontaneous as his lifetime of travel and creative experimentation would lead us to believe. He was painting in the countryside last summer when he decided to cue up an old record by the Doors. “The song ‘People Are Strange’ came on, and [Jim Morrison] keeps saying, ‘When you’re strange, when you’re straaaange…’ and I just thought to myself—watching the news and looking at the world around us—you know what? People really are frickin’ strange,” Condo recalls. “Not the same way that they were probably back in the ’60s, like Jim Morrison was talking about it, but the people like George Santos and Lindsey Graham and Kevin McCarthy and the people who run this government and the people who created this divisive world that we live in today.”