Wilson College’s Cooley Gallery presents ‘You never wash it off completely,’ an exhibition of installations and recent works by artist Jim Condron. The show will run from September 4th to December 15, 2019. To mark Wilson College’s sesquicentennial, Condron worked with the college’s archivists, professors, and students to construct compelling art installations from campus relics and artifacts. The works of art engage with Wilson College’s rich and unique history.

Over 40 sculptures and paintings by contemporary artist Jim Condron explore the ephemeral materials of life one chooses to collect. Nostalgia, remorse, repression, stamina, chance and vitality intermingle with paint, thickening mediums, solvents, adhesives, remnants, wood, foam, cement, scrap metal, plastic, repurposed animal fur, clothing, mannequins and trash cans through these operatic paintings and assemblage constructions.

Condron’s pieces are titled with a textual story fragment intended to add to each work’s rhetoric, rather than naming or defining it. Titles are applied to the pieces with the same method that Condron assembles materials. Phrases from literature that resonate with the artist are appropriated from an array of great authors such as Don DeLillo, James Salter, Anton Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, Oscar Wilde, Hunter Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, Ernest Hemmingway, Henry Miller, Anais Nin. These works are paired with quotations by famous historical artists and authors “talking trash” about the work of other famous historical artists and authors. These humorous pairings affirm Condron’s view that someone’s meaningless trash is someone else’s art and history.

Highly conversant and tactile works such as Conscience and cowardice are really the same thing combine epoxy, oil paint, wood, animal fur, and ceramic tile configured to reference both Phillip Guston’s figures and heraldic shields from Condron’s childhood fascination with coats of arms.  

The sculpture I never take any notice of what common people say, and I never interfere with what charming people say is made with a section of a lobster trap, lacrosse mesh, and diamond plate steel. The work encompasses motifs of protection and entrapment and alludes to Matisse’s Piano Lesson (1916). 

Trash Talk: History in Assemblage is an exhibition about art’s act of preserving. Through nostalgia the artist transforms the ephemeral, what could have been trash, into something meaningful and more permanent, imbuing objects with purpose.

In 2017, Jim Condron was a recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He earned his MFA at the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and holds a BA in Art and English from Colby College. In addition, he studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture. He has exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally, and his works are held in corporate, university, and public and private collections around the world.

Close to You,’ an art installation to honor the memory of Karen Condron, will be featured at the Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual Wings Over Wall Street Benefit Gala. The stirring exhibition includes ten sculptural installations by her son, the artist Jim Condron. Karen Condron passed away in July of 2018 after a nearly eight-year battle with ALS. She was the 2015 winner of the MDA Spirit Award and embodied all that the award represents.

To make the sculptural works, Jim Condron combines his mother’s clothing and shoes with materials such as a bicycle, a crib, mannequin arms, yarrow and straw to create intangible forms that express his mother’s ebullience throughout her life and the challenges of the disease. Each piece expresses the complexities of nostalgia and deep grief. The exhibition will also include personal photographs and ephemera that openly depict his mother’s joys, and her losses as ALS progressed through her body.

Jim Condron’s works of art honor Karen’s life and were created to raise awareness of the life-threatening effects of muscular dystrophy and muscle-debilitating diseases, such as ALS, and of MDA’s important mission to find a cure.

About the Artist
Jim Condron has exhibited extensively for over two decades, and his work is collected by museums and institutions nationally and internationally.

About MDA
The Muscular Dystrophy Association is committed to transforming the lives of people affected by muscular dystrophy, ALS, and related neuromuscular diseases.

Gala / Exhibit Location: Building – 555 West 18th Street, New York City (at 11th Avenue) NY, NY. Registration Required.

Jim Condron: Diminishing Returns, a solo exhibition showcasing over twenty paintings and new sculptural works is being presented at Goucher College’s Silber Art Gallery in the Sandy J. Unger Athenaeum now open through March 26, 2018 at 1021 Dulaney Valley Road, in Baltimore. An artist’s reception will be held February 9, 2018, from 6:00-9:00 p.m.

This exhibition incites viewers to examine the application of the economic principle of the law of diminishing returns to painting and art making in the 21st century. The paintings in the show range in size from 5x6 inches to 90x144 inches. Each painting gradually increases in size while maintaining the project’s foundational proportion. The sculptural works in the show reference farming practices and consider the framework by which the economic concept of the law of diminishing returns was founded and explained. The agriculturally based sculptures and abstract paintings also investigate the law of diminishing marginal utility. A highlight of the show is a sculpture made from a vintage 1940’s General GG tractor in a bed of Red Bird Peppermint Puffs. Visitors are invited to experience the principle of diminishing marginal utility by eating as many of the candies as they like.
Through his paintings, Condron presents a haptic convergence of scale, size, color, texture, and dimensionality. The works explore how the physical size of a painting impacts the meaning and power of a work of art for both the artist and the viewer. The paintings in the show are hung in succession vertically and horizontally from the largest works to the smallest works. It is the artist’s hope that as the viewer confronts the exhibition and then each painted canvas, the importance of the scale and size of the work diminishes and the viewer is absorbed in the experience of each individual work of art.
The sculptural works in the exhibition, constructed from vintage farm equipment, are poignant reminders of America’s rich, though tainted, agricultural past and the economic challenges American farmers face in the year 2018 at a moment in history when the commodification of art is unregulated.

Julio Fine Arts Gallery presents the exhibition “Picking Up Pieces” from October 27 – November 22, 2017. The show includes more than 35 works of art by Jim Condron, one of this year’s top Pollock-Krasner award winners. The artist draws on humor and memory, and finds unexpected beauty in juxtaposing everyday objects and cast-off remnants with the traditional medium of paint. Condron picks up bits of physical objects that draw on the mental images preserved from his personal life and from his engagements with art history. Mundane fragments from everyday life, such as a 1970s tennis-ball can, candy wrappers, or a shovel handle, find new meaning in his surprising conflations. (The tennis-ball can, for instance, is at once banal and poignant, since the artist spent countless hours as a child by the courts as his mother played.) Condron’s huddles of broken materials break from abstraction and convention to find joy and wit in the most banal tokens of experience. Like his sculptures, Condron constructs his paintings by mixing color and visual fragments he sources from the art world and from his daily life. The title of each sculpture or painting suggests a story still unfolding, bits of autobiography that tease the viewer’s own subconscious. Condron’s visual explorations test the limits of color, form, texture, and chance.

“Like a contemporary Dada master, Jim Condron finds wit and beauty in unexpected collisions between the mundane and the artful. His works are edgy and provocative, and delivered with more calculation than may at first meet the eye. He tests the limits of his materials, while simultaneously assuring us that it's perfectly okay to smile” -Ann Landi, Art Critic & Journalist, Vasari21, Wall Street Journal, ARTnews