George Condo

George Condo is as well known for his exquisite, painterly portraits as he is for the bizarre cast of archetypal characters that inhabit them. His subjects are classically posed, dramatically lit, and surrounded by conflated fragments from the history of painting, such as bubbles, glass bottles, drapery, vegetables lifted from the still-life table, and vague empty settings to better project the subject of the picture. In the end, however, the entire world and inner life of his subjects derive completely from his imagination.

Arriving in New York in the 1980s, George Condo became involved with members of Andy Warhol's Factory and collaborated with prominent figures of the Beat Generation. His recent paintings and prints contain elements of a figurative, cartoon, Surrealist,and Pop heritage combined with an equal interest in painterly abstraction. His line etchings and drawings display his virtuosity as a draftsman.

When George Condo showed at Pat Hearn in the East Village in the early 1980's, he was one of the odder and more interesting painters around. He still is.

At Hearn, his suavely brushed images of microcephalic figures with Bozo noses were like surreal versions of Goya's court portraits. Later, at Pace, he virtuosically riffed on Picasso's Cubistic paintings of women. If Picasso's aim was to subject academic classicism to drastic cosmetic surgery, Condo used less radical procedures to chop, dice and reprocess Picasso's art. The results were neither respectful enough to be appropriations nor sardonic enough to be takeoffs.

George Condo engages with history of art and gives his “abstract-figurative” version out of it. He corresponds freely with a ”pre-existing” imagery (Velasquez, David, Picasso, Bacon, Dali, etc.) to enlighten his visions of bodies and spaces and put them in prospects. He paints portraits, vanities, still-lifes, “a whole collection of things”.
As "painting is to be and to say" he gives himself the right to place along side images his signature occasionally, or even the designation through a title in front of the canvas. Félix Guattari said of him: “Well, you reinvent Modern Art rather than denying it massively. You demonstrate by your unconscious“ acting out ”that painting, as a production of subjectivity, is still and always possible, if being taken over from its birth.”

Daniel Richter

Like few others, Daniel Richter (*1962) has set the tone of painting in Germany since the 1990s. In May 2007, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg will be the first museum to mount a large retrospective exhibition of his paintings. Richter combines clichés from art history, the mass media and popular culture in large-format oil paintings, thus creating unusual narrative pictorial worlds. The exhibition in Hamburg will provide an overview of his painting to date, and it is being mounted in close collaboration with the artist. More than 50 large paintings will be on show, and, for the first time, a selection from the series of more than 400 small formats, which serve Richter both as sketches of ideas and as a diary.

Richter studied at the Hamburg Hochschule für bildende Künste under Werner Büttner and was an assistant to Albert Oehlen. His first paintings were abstract, their strongly colourful psychedelic cosmos of forms oscillating between graffiti and ornament. Surrealism, underground and the intertwined grotesques of Italian mannerism were his points of orientation.

At the turn of the millennium, Richter turned from the abstract mesh to the human body, and since then his painting has been exclusively figurative. In large scenes with myriad figures, often inspired by reproductions in newspapers or history books, he portrays themes of strife and threat with an excessive vitality. Richter's return to figurative painting was widely celebrated as the rebirth of history painting – albeit a rebirth under a different sign. Whereas history painting relied on clearly legible pictorial narratives and aimed to legitimate the present by calling on the past, Richter's paintings deal with the failure of modernism's utopias. ‘I was interested in how to reference the world and the image of the world as I perceive it or wish to describe it’, is how the artist himself explained the change.

Some of the themes of the paintings he then produced were, for example, the failed communist uprising in Hamburg Barmbek in 1923 (Nerdon) or the overloaded rubber dinghys transporting refugees from North Africa (Fatifa). Frequently the motifs and readings of Richter's paintings are characterised by a significant ambivalence. His first figurative work, Phienox, for example, presents a dramatically-charged scene in which people are helping to heave a man over a high wall. It was painted in the year 2000, just as the tenth anniversary of German reunification was being commemorated. The painting, however, was inspired by a newspaper photograph documenting the events surrounding the terrorist attack on the American embassy in Nairobi. Most of Richter's paintings are picture puzzles of this kind, which the viewer has to complete with the help of his own knowledge and ideas of politics and popular culture.

Martin Eder

The paintings that have won the 38-year-old Berlin-based artist Martin Eder the widest audience, with their lush, velvety colors and faded elegance, a patently disturbing documentation of a dreamy Netherworld somewhere between domicility (or pornographic domesticity) and death. In these images, which always seem haunted by some unseen force, Eder subjects the psycho-pornography of every day life to a ruthless examination. Which is not to say his paintings are devoid of beauty; Eder's poetic instincts play far too great a role in ordering these melancholy states, which a more callous hand might smudge with less ambiguous emotions. Although the paintings are richly painted and romantic, presenting an idealized world, an underlying strain of violence and despair is also apparent.

Some may say that German artist Martin Eder's work is a ham-fisted reworking of kitch and porn ala Jeff Koons. But I find there to be a luscious sensualness and a slightly human awkwardness to the way he approaches the figure that transcends any simple-minded comment on society. Eder's work may be vulgar and sometimes crass (such as the fantastic Masturbating Woman Surrounded by Bad Towels) but he somehow hits at a perfect balance of classical form and grotesque pornographic pose that accentuates the erotic qualities of an ideal figure's imperfections.

NEO RAUCH

Neo Rauch at the Met: para
May 22, 2007–October 14, 2007
The Gioconda and Joseph King Gallery, Lila Acheson Wallace Wing, Modern Art
On view are new paintings made specifically for this exhibition by the Leipzig artist Neo Rauch, one of the most widely acclaimed painters of his generation. Shaped by the experience of growing up in East Germany, Rauch’s paintings teeter between Surrealism and popular imagery and defy easy interpretation. Viewers are drawn into scenes replete with historical figures in ambiguous landscapes. With a distinctive palette of bright acidic colors contrasting with deep shadows, the artist’s paintings conjure up an atmosphere of confused nostalgia and failed utopias.

Neo Rauch at the Met: para presents eleven new paintings made specifically for this exhibition by the artist Neo Rauch (b. 1960, Leipzig, Germany), one of the most widely acclaimed painters of his generation. The exhibition — on view from May 22 through September 23, 2007 —is the third in the Museum’s series dedicated to artists at mid-career, following exhibitions featuring Tony Oursler in 2005 and Kara Walker in 2006.

Shaped by the experience of growing up in East Germany, Rauch’s paintings teeter between Surrealism and popular imagery, defying easy interpretation. Viewers are drawn into scenes replete with strange beings and ambiguous landscapes. Full of activity yet mysteriously static in feeling, Rauch’s paintings are fantasy painted as fact, and many of his large-format works are populated by figures that are connected spatially, yet remain alienated and unaware of each other. With a distinctive palette of bright acidic colors contrasting with deep shadows, the artist’s paintings conjure up an atmosphere of confused nostalgia and failed utopias.

Rauch has said, “For me, painting means the continuation of a dream with other means.” The artist is inspired by misplaced memories and momentary perceptions that are lost before they can be named. In this vein, Rauch has titled his exhibition at the Met para. Although there are many familiar elements in the parallel world of Rauch’s paintings, the situations depicted are bizarre and the normal is mixed freely with the abnormal.

Trained at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, Rauch continues to live and work in the city of his birth, and has inspired a younger generation of painters in Leipzig’s thriving artistic community. Rauch’s work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2006); Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, Canada (2006); Albertina, Vienna, Austria (2004); Saint Louis Art Museum (2003); and Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin, Germany (2001), among other museums.

Neo Rauch at the Met: para is organized by Gary Tinterow, Engelhard Curator in Charge of the Metropolitan’s Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art. After its presentation at the Met, the exhibition will travel to the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl, Germany in October 2007. On the occasion of the exhibition, DuMont publishers (Cologne, Germany) will release a related publication that will include 12 color illustrations and an essay by Werner Spies.