王庆松

This collection of bizarrely sensuous new paintings, drawings and sculpture by the well-known New York City artist is based mainly on a nefarious and hedonistic shape-shifting character named Jean Louis, whose multiple personalities include a chauffeur, a butler, a maid, a chef and other assorted relatives. In one painting we see Jean Louis as "Uncle Joe," naked from the waist down and balancing a wine glass upon his raised foot; in another, he is a reclining female nude, clenching a cigarette between the fingers of an exceedingly hairy and Dr. Seuss-ish black glove. In this new, highly ironic body of work, much of which refers directly to Picasso, Condo aligns himself with a long line of art historical portraiture. His subjects are as elegant and alienating as they are absurd and comical; any notion of the classical is subverted through his outrageous morphology, as he enjoys the playful interweaving of high and low.George Condo was born in Concord, NH, in 1957. In the early 1980s he worked at Andy Warhol's Factory, then later rose to fame alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Julian Schnabel, playing a key role in the 80s revival of painting. His work is in most major American museums.