BALTIMORE, MD.- 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

Condron, originally from Long Island, NY and Connecticut, lives and works in Baltimore. Condron earned his MFA at the Leroy E. Hofffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in Art and English from Colby College, Waterville, ME. He also studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. Since 1993, Condron has studied with Rohini Ralby, the artist's mentor. His work appears nationally and internationally in galleries and museums as well as in corporate, university, public and private collections. Condron has been awarded artist residencies at The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, The Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Heliker Lahotan Foundation. He is a 2017 recipient of a Pollock Krasner Foundation grant, an Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant and a Maryland State Arts Council grant for sculpture.