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.”