Pastels in New York
George Condo is in two places at once this spring with the exhibition Pastels that spans galleries at both Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth in New York, offering a glimpse into the artist’s creative process and inventiveness through the medium of pastel.
Once used primarily for small works on paper and outdoor sketching – and with the exception of Degas rarely associated with the highest form of art – Condo’s new works push the medium to its limits, using gesso, fields of color, and dramatic strokes all laid down with no preparatory drawing.
Red Spatial Figure
George Condo, 2024
Pastel and Acrylic on Paper
Once used primarily for small works on paper and outdoor sketching – and with the exception of Degas rarely associated with the highest form of art – Condo’s new works push the medium to its limits, using gesso, fields of color, and dramatic strokes all laid down with no preparatory drawing.
Mark Leckey: As Above So Below
Turner prize winning artist Mark Leckey gets his first solo show in Paris thanks to the Lafayette Foundation – the cultural branch of the upmarket store.
The exhibition plays into our appetite for fun immersive experiences – here Leckey’s looped recordings of videos and sculptures are designed to bring onlookers to a temporary state of ecstasy. The artist makes a big promise: to remove you from your normal place of function and towards something “groundless, without horizon or axis.”
Bridge Fall
Mark Leckey, 2021
Image Courtesy of the artist
Desire and transformation, according to the Tate, are key motifs in Leckey’s work to which he returns in a variety of manifestations. His own life story provides a rich vein of experience which he has mined throughout his artistic journey from a Wirrel school dropout with one O level in art, via forming bands and becoming a professor of film studies in Germany, to the head of a successful London based studio practice. In 2008 he won the Turner Prize for his work Industrial Light and Magic.
Leckey has maintained a connection with the luxury fashion industry and one of his best-known works is the music video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, a work he says reflects on how “something as trite and throwaway and exploitative as a jeans manufacturer can be made into something totemic, and powerful, and life-affirming.”
From April 2nd to 20th July at Lafayette Fondation Galleries, Paris, France
www.lafayetteanticipations.com
