Miguel Condé: A Retrospective: Paintings, Watercolors, and Drawings

SAN FRANCISCO (August 26, 2013) — Serge Sorokko Gallery - announces it will host the U.S. premiere of the celebrated Catalonia-based Mexican artist Miguel Condé's large-scale exhibition, Miguel Condé: a Retrospective. This extraordinary installation of paintings, watercolors, and drawings spans over forty years and is the acclaimed artist's first major solo exhibition in the Western United States.

Miguel Condé's Retrospective will open to the public on August 20th, and remain on view at the Serge Sorokko Gallery through October 19th, 2013. A private reception will be held on September 19th, from

6:00pm to 8:00pm at Serge Sorokko Gallery in celebration the US premiere of this exhibition.

"I am very excited to bring this important collection of Miguel Condé's work to San Francisco," said gallery owner Serge Sorokko. "This exhibition represents a rare opportunity for people in the Bay Area to view Condé's remarkable paintings and exquisite works on paper, although, as with all of his exhibitions, we anticipate nationwide interest in this important retrospective."

The exhibition comprises rare early paintings on canvas, which, according to the artist "are a narrative which could be carried out on stage, and on canvas, perhaps even on film," as well as over 25 watercolors and drawings on paper created between mid-1970's and 2000's.

"The choreography of human interaction is the subject matter of Miguel Condé's art," observed San Francisco Fine Arts Museums' Robert Johnson, Curator Emeritus at the Achenbach Foundation. "The all too human fragility of our emotions are made visible in his drawings, watercolors, and paintings. He is a master draftsman, for whom line is the structure on which his art is built, strengthened and embellished through color and creative composition. The emotional warmth of his Spanish environment is reflected in his extroverted artistic sensibilities."

It is Condé's extraordinary draftsmanship, combined with his unique sensibilities that fascinate art critics the most. "In his compositions, increasingly more complex and meticulous," suggests the prominent Spanish author Maria Lluïsa Borràs in the influential Spanish daily El Pais, "the absurd and the enigmatic gradually come together: Goya's black irony, Bosch's phantasmagorias, Brueghel's repulsion and fluidity, and Dürer's virtuoso drawing."

The exhibition marks the artist's first trip to the Bay Area in over 40 years, and it is particularly significant given the recent announcement by the San Francisco Mexican Museum that Condé has agreed to join its esteemed Arts & Letters Council. "The membership list of our Arts & Letters Council is a Who's Who in the world of Latino art and culture," said Andrew Kluger, chairman of The Mexican Museum's Board of Directors.

Miguel Conde's works are collected by Museums all over the globe, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo and the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, Spain, the Albertina in Vienna, Austria, the Brooklyn Museum in New York, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among many others.

The Serge Sorokko Gallery is located at 55 Geary Street in San Francisco and can be visited online at www.sorokko.com. Gallery hours are from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Telephone: 415 421-7770.

About Miguel Condé

Miguel Condé is a Mexican figurative painter, draftsman and etcher. According to Radio France, he is "one of the most important contemporary masters in the field of engraving." Born in 1939 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, he grew up in his father's house in Mexico. Condé attended P.S. 6 and Walden School, both in Manhattan, and later studied anatomy with Stephen Rogers Peck in New York and etching techniques in Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in Paris. Recipient of a Guggenheim Latin American Fellowship and a grant from the French Government, Condé has been awarded various international prizes and is an appointed member of the Société des Peintres-Graveurs Français. His work is represented in numerous museums and collections around the globe. He currently lives and works between Madrid and Sitges, Spain.