With his work raking in millions of dollars on the auction block, George Condo has been picked to inaugurate Hauser & Wirth’s new West Hollywood gallery, which will open in February.
The opening will come as many major galleries expand to Los Angeles. The international art world has taken a new interest in the city, thanks in part to the advent of the Frieze art fair there, and last year, around the time of that event’s third edition, a number of galleries, including Hauser & Wirth competitors Pace and David Zwirner, revealed plans to put down roots there. (Hauser & Wirth has operated a Los Angeles space since 2016, and will continue to do so alongside this new West Hollywood one.)
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Condo’s newest show will be titled “People Are Strange,” an allusion to a 1967 song by the band The Doors, and will feature more of the artist’s signature paintings, which draw on Picasso’s heavily abstracted images of people as though they were seen from multiple angles at once.
Seeking to play up the show’s L.A. connections, Hauser & Wirth’s announcement labels the Doors song “quintessentially Los Angeles” and promised “fragmented portraits and abstractions that echo LA’s sublime dissonance.” (Condo, for his part, is based in New York.)
Marc Payot, president of Hauser & Wirth, told ARTnews in an email, “George Condo is a foremost American artist of his generation and one with an especially avid following among fellow artists, curators and collectors in Los Angeles. He has a long history with LA, a true understanding of what makes the city so uniquely itself, and this is felt in the new works. We are very excited that George made this series of paintings expressly for the West Hollywood space. So we know it will be a great first show for visitors to experience there.”