a-l-ancien-regime: Queluz  palace, an 18th century-royal residence which is one of the main rococo buildings in Portugal. bootoo: Kate O’Connor EXCLUSIVE: Rick Owens x Zebra Katz Video phillipsdepury: GEORGE CONDO | Woman in Blue Chair, 2007 | Oil on canvas Sold for £205,250 at the Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 16 February 2012, London. George Condo is one of the most prolific and celebrated artists of our time, almost exclusively focusing on portraiture and drawing his influences from Old Master painting, European History painting, Cubism and Mannerism and creating his own unique style. His portraits, however, go beyond the mere portrayal of the sitter’s physical appearance; instead they look inside – like all good portraiture – at the state of mind and character of the sitter. “I wanted to capture the characters in these paintings at the extreme height of whatever moment they are in – in that static moment of chaos – and to picture them as abstract compositions that are set in destitute places and isolated rooms” (the artist in an interview with Ralph Rugoff, in George Condo: Existential Portraits, exh. cat., New York, Luhring Augustine, 2006, p. 8). The current lot depicts a woman sitting in a blue arm chair apparently caught up in her own thoughts. Her limbs are elongated, her face deformed and mask-like, her neck is swollen, the body’s proportions are exaggerated and her position seems unnatural and uncomfortable. One eye stares out with an awkward and confrontational scrutiny, engaging the viewer in some sort of exchange, while the other stares away into nothingness. This rhythm of being drawn into the work by one eye and being pushed out by the other is heightened by the fact that although repelled by her look, the viewer is also sympathetically drawn to her vulnerable state. Condo explains this look of the grotesque: “I consider them to be feelings or the inside of that person’s private life being visible on the outside” (ibid., p. 10). The exchange between sitter and viewer put the latter in an uncomfortable voyeuristic position yet endowing a bizarre power in the exposure of the sitter’s psychological state. “I think the paintings have to do with the idea of people’s despair today, with the idea that they don’t really have a choice. They may think that they have a choice, and to a certain degree they’re being told that they have a choice, but the choices they make are very much within the geopolitical map for how people should live their lives at any given time. So in the paintings, these characters expand beyond those boundaries. They are questioning their existence. Faced with despair, they decide to live way out there beyond the periphery of consciousness” (ibid., p. 7). thetuesdayafter: David Benjamin Sherry sergioalbiac: Around you (by Sergio Albiac) Generative portrait www.sergioalbiac.com Facebook page urbanautica: Kon Trubkovich‘Leap Second’OHWOW, Los Angeles18.5.2012 - 23.6.2012With his Los Angeles debut, Kon Trubkovich reveals his most personal work to date. A new series of paintings, works on paper, and a sound piece translate psychological underpinnings through elegantly complex methods. The television static, weak transmissions, and tenuous connections he depicts suggest that somewhere behind all the noise and disruption there is a broadcast confirming our existence and interconnection.Prominent in the exhibition are a group of large-scale portraits of the artist’s mother, culled from just one second of home video, which documented the final party she threw in the U.S.S.R before the family immigrated to the U.S. Defining a transitional moment of flux, these works illuminate the difficultly of tracing the past and express our elusive connection to the concept of origin. Through oil on linen, Trubkovich visually describes the sensation of relating to a person or physical location that no longer exists, or at least not as remembered, and aims to parse latent recall into a tangible codex.In Erich Fromm’s book The Art of Loving, which inspired Trubkovich’s exhibition, the author suggests that love is a refuge – a remedy for isolation and our disconnection from each other and nature. By archiving whispers of feelings and recollections, which are dangerously close to disappearing forever, the artist forms a pictorial and emotional space, simultaneously. Implied by the title, the work presented in Leap Second also aligns with the actuality of phantom time. All of the paused moments, ethos, and bits of history that Trubkovich has chosen to suspend, occurred in the matter of an instant. This work fleshes out the missing measure by developing sentiment, and in doing so, accounts for just one leap second.© All copyright OHWOW | Kon Trubkovich