From left: George Condo Dreaming Nude, 2006 and Cady Noland SLA Group Shot With Floating Head, 1991
Become an auction insider this fall with Phillips First Reveal. Each Friday we'll be showcasing a new work from our upcoming New York 20th Century & Contemporary Art sales, installing it inside The Box @ Phillips, a newly dedicated exhibition space located in the plaza of 450 Park Avenue at the corner of 57th Street. Each Saturday we'll unveil the work exclusively on Instagram along with insights about the artist from our specialists. Stay tuned for a new reveal each week through 19 October.
First Reveal | Friday 29 September
George Condo Dreaming Nude, 2006
Dreaming Nude is a quintessential example of George Condo's singular and iconic approach to portraiture. Executed in 2006, it belongs to the handful of paintings from the artist's seminal Existential Portraits series that tackle the grand tradition of the reclining nude. Painting entirely from his imagination and art historical memory, Condo synthesizes art historical influences ranging from Old Master painting to Cubism with a sensibility informed by popular culture, to construct a surreal scene. The precedents of Francisco Goya's La Maja desnuda, 1795-1800, and Édouard Manet's Olympia, 1863, powerfully figure here.
The woman's physiognomy confronts us with a threatening gaze reminiscent of Willem de Kooning's women or the screaming heads in Picasso's Guernica, 1937 — one that does not merely challenge the male gaze of art history, but in fact attacks it with a jarring, animal-like snarl. Showcasing both Condo's remarkable draughtsmanship and virtuoso handling of paint, Dreaming Nude set the foundation for the artist's celebrated Drawing Paintings from 2011 and 2012.
That's what painting is all about: discovering a way to paint because you love paint. I could roll myself in it, drink it, eat it and kill myself, suffocating in it.
— George Condo
Cady Noland SLA Group Shot With Floating Head, 1991
SLA Group Shot With Floating Head, 1991, previously housed in the same private collection for decades, features one of Cady Noland's most frequently visited subjects—American anti-heroine Patty Hearst and her kidnappers, the Symbionese Liberation Army. This unique work explores a hallmark of the artist's conceptual practice: the media's distortion of and influence on America's collective history.
In an era dominated by political uncertainty, Noland in the late 1980s and early 1990s began to repurpose tabloid imagery from the 1960s and '70s for a series of silkscreen enlargements printed on aluminum. Here, she derived her source imagery specifically from a photograph of a distressed newspaper clipping covering Patty Hearst's infamous kidnapping in 1973, which dominated the American tabloid for years. More than any specific narrative, it is Noland's fascination with the subversion of the American psyche through celebrity that truly informs works such as the present one. The resulting works, according to Robert Nickas "stand as…the most potent—and darkest—American pop since Warhol's 'Disaster' paintings of the mid-'60s."