George Condo - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Sunday, June 26, 2011 | Phillips

Create your first list.

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

  • Provenance

    Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris; Private Collection, Paris

  • Catalogue Essay

    George Condo’s painting style is characterized by a unique permeation of influences drawn from Old Master paintings, European history painting, Mannerism, Greek mythological figures and Cubism, examining the limits of portraiture in similar ways to Pablo Picasso or Francis Bacon. By adopting techniques, styles and methods from earlier painters and applying these to invented subjects and motives drawn from his own observation and influences, Condo creates as he says ‘composites of various psychological states painted in different ways’. As he further states, his ‘objective is to portray the strangeness that I feel, and the strangeness that I see is the strangeness that is around me…it is in that sense that I call myself a realist’. In his portraits Condo depicts seemingly commonplace people, distorts and infuses them with a sense of the grotesque and the absurd, making deliberate ruptures, allowing for discontinuity and exaggerations and thereby conveying the hallucinatory energy of the depicted. 'Sometimes I’m involving a number of images from different paintings, with slight variations at times. I think of them as themes and variations, composites of various psychological states painted in various different ways and a continuation of the overall concept for Artificial Realism…“the realistic representation of that which is artificial" [...] is about dismantling one reality and constructing another from the same parts, and that various concrete objects are not attached to their parts alone. I was thinking of Picasso’s bull’s head made from a bicycle and Duchamp’s ready-mades. Essentially what I am painting is the state in which the image-time of one reality is superimposed in a field of another simultaneous presence now becomes a new conjunctive hyper-reality or hybrid image showing the simultaneous presences’. (From the interview between Ralph Rugoff and George Condo, exh. cat.: George Condo: Existential Portraits, Luhring Augustine, New York, 5 May – 3 June 2006).

  • 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

32

Don Diego

2009
Oil on canvas.
130 x 130 cm (51 1/8 x 51 1/8 in).
Signed and dated ‘Condo 09’ on the reverse.

Estimate
£180,000 - 220,000 

Sold for £205,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

27 June
London