George Condo - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale New York Thursday, November 17, 2016 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Simon Lee Gallery, London
    Private Collection, Paris
    Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, March 31, 2008, lot 117
    Private Collection, Belgium (acquired at the above sale)
    Phillips de Pury & Company, New York, May 11, 2012, lot 157
    Private Collection, New York (acquired at the above sale)
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Catalogue Essay

    George Condo’s abstract paintings of the late 20th century are unique in their appropriation of various languages of representation, transformed into the personal language of the artist himself. His colorful, expansive canvases bear resemblance to Pablo Picasso’s cubism, Joan Miró’s surrealist compositions, Willem de Kooning’s grotesque figuration, and Jackson Pollock’s drips, all at once. After his “Expanding Canvas” series of the 1980s, the motifs of which are particularly reminiscent of the forms found in de Kooning’s figurative and abstract work, Condo experimented with the influence of other art forms on his work, such as jazz music. For Condo, abstraction and jazz both share aspects of improvisation and creative freedom. In his “Portraits Lost in Space” series from the 1990s, Condo experiments with this idea in abstract canvases interspersed with the names of famous jazz musicians. Similar to some of his modern predecessors like Wassily Kandinsky, Condo fuses the symbolic associations of sound, color and abstraction. In this series the stylization of abstract form and the speedy unpredictable nature of jazz arrangements complement each other, one in direct dialogue with the other.

    The present lot, Memories of Spain, 1991, seems to fall in a unique place between the two series, bearing similarities to his musically-inspired paintings from “Portraits Lost in Space” and “Expanding Canvas”. In Memories of Spain, Condo fuses the abstract articulation of jazz with the biomorphic forms and colors found in the art of Miró. Unlike his jazz paintings, in which the musician’s name is juxtaposed with the free-flowing abstract application of the paint, here music is suggested aesthetically through the dots, squares, and ordered black shapes that call to mind sheet music and the genre’s sporadic nature. Memories of time spent in Spain appear on the canvas as homage to the unique spatial arrangements found in Miró’s compositions. As Laura Hoptman explains, “Filtered through Condo’s mind, the experience and moment, the subject of memories is the way in which the younger artist has assimilated the vocabulary of the older one.” (Laura Hoptman, “Abstraction as a State of Mind,” George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2011, p. 27). In this way, the present lot is a testament to Condo’s ability to redefine modernist interpretations and express them in new and innovative ways, while still evoking a sense of nostalgia for painting’s past.

  • Artist Biography

    George Condo

    American • 1957

    Picasso once said, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Indeed, American artist George Condo frequently cites Picasso as an explicit source in his contemporary cubist compositions and joyous use of paint. Condo is known for neo-Modernist compositions staked in wit and the grotesque, which draw the eye into a highly imaginary world. 

    Condo came up in the New York art world at a time when art favored brazen innuendo and shock. Student to Warhol, best friend to Basquiat and collaborator with William S. Burroughs, Condo tracked a different path. He was drawn to the endless inquiries posed by the aesthetics and formal considerations of Caravaggio, Rembrandt and the Old Masters.

    View More Works

115

Memories of Spain

signed, titled and dated "George Condo 91 Memories of Spain" on the reverse
oil on canvas
82 x 78 1/8 in. (208.3 x 198.4 cm.)
Painted in 1991.

Estimate
$200,000 - 300,000 

Sold for $250,000

Contact Specialist
John McCord
Head of Day Sale
New York
+1 212 940 1261

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

New York Auction 17 November 2016