George Condo’s two-venue exhibition, “Pastels”, ran concurrently at Sprüth Magers (Upper East Side) and Hauser & Wirth (SoHo) in New York earlier this year.
The premise was simple and focused: a single medium pushed to its limits. Across roughly twenty new large works on paper (many around two metres high), Condo worked directly in pastel, often over fields of gesso and acrylic with metallic flourishes, and without preparatory sketches. The approach favoured improvisation and speed while keeping his familiar tension between figuration and abstraction. At Hauser & Wirth, the centre of gravity was a suite of fractured portraits, Condo’s “bizarre characters”, their features splintered into bright planes that hold together just enough to read as heads. Uptown at Sprüth Magers the emphasis shifted, with frenetic colour compositions and a notable group of black-and-white pastels that strip back to line, rhythm and gesture. Together the two shows read like a concise essay on process and tone.
Public response was enthusiastic from the start. Openings were well attended by curators, artists and advisers, and the press homed in on the immediacy of the mark-making. The Brooklyn Rail’s review called the display “a knockout”, noting how visible brushwork, splatters and pressed pastel amplify the sense of velocity and improvisation. It also recorded Condo’s own language around fighting with the work and making pieces in single sittings. An Observer interview framed the project within his long-running interest in “psychological cubism” and a present-tense, fractured state of mind, with Condo casting the medium’s freedom as a way to cut past polite restraint.
On the market side, the story was unambiguous: demand outpaced supply. Artnet News reported prices from about $600,000 to $1.5 million per work on paper, with the Hauser & Wirth presentation described as completely sold out and the eight Sprüth Magers portraits placed on opening night, part of what the report characterised as a $23 million blitz across both venues. The same piece captured the mood of the rooms, “mobbed”, with a long waiting list, and set those primary prices against recent auction performance for context.
Beyond sales headlines, a few details helped the shows stick in the memory. Scale mattered: most sheets were human-sized which, coupled with painted grounds, made them read more like paintings under glass than drawings. Titles such as Collision Course, Brown Expanded Head and Multiple Personalities signalled states rather than stories. The split-site format was not a gimmick; it gave each gallery a distinct register while letting the whole project breathe. The scheduling also kept momentum through the season, with Sprüth Magers closing in early March and Hauser & Wirth running into mid April.
Taken together, “Pastels” felt like a concise statement rather than a greatest-hits survey: new work, a strict material brief, and enough room to show range inside those constraints. If you were tracking public reaction, the combination of strong critical notices and a sold-out primary market presentation made it one of the early-year bellwethers in New York.
References:
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Artnet News — “Oomph! George Condo Opens New York Doubleheader in $23 Million Blitz”
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The Brooklyn Rail — “George Condo: Pastels” (review by Joseph Akel)
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designboom — “George Condo renders ‘bizarre characters’ for NYC show ‘PASTELS’”