George Condo - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Wednesday, February 27, 2008 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Acquired directly from the artist

  • Catalogue Essay

    As sister arts, music and painting share a common vocabulary. Colours have tones and harmonies while both arts are often referred to as compositions. George Condo’s works are being described as figurative abstraction. We can find elements of both a figurative thought-process, reflected in the title of this painting, and the abstracted execution Condo enacts upon the canvas’s surface. This work is a powerful example how the art of music can be visually recorded in the art of painting, bringing together two forms that feed off each other both content and context wise. Condo records the melodic juxtaposition between his experience of listening to music by The Beatles and mirroring it onto his chosen surface, creating a painting that entwines both personal interpretation and methodological approach in one.

  • 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

145

The Beatles

1999
Acrylic on canvas.
91.4 x 91.4 cm. (35 5/8 x 35 5/8 in).
Signed, titled and dated ‘Condo The Beatles 99’ on the reverse.

Estimate
£25,000 - 35,000 

Sold for £30,500

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

28 Feb 2008, 7pm
London