Consistently referred to as one of America’s most influential contemporary artists, George Condo has left an indelible mark on the development of visual culture. In Untitled, 2015, the artist masterfully restrains the densely-layered planes that constitute the depicted figure with a controlled palette of primary colours, alluding to the Cubist titan Pablo Picasso whilst simultaneously bringing to mind the Modernist master Piet Mondrian, whose primary grids provided an antidote to the formal freedom of his Cubist contemporaries. Condo boldly combines the two artists’ stylistic signatures into a wholly new piece, all the while retaining the idiosyncratic ‘Condo’ stamp that makes the work unmistakably his. The result is a formally-stunning androgynous face which teases the viewer’s assumptions on the definition of portraiture.
Since his emergence onto the 1980s New York art scene alongside figures such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Condo has consolidated his place as one of his generation’s leading artists. Like Haring and Basquiat, Condo was critically engaged throughout the eighties in a new form of figurative painting that stylistically blended the representational and the abstract. Commenting on Condo’s prodigious absorption of the canon, Laura Hoptman draws attention to the artist’s ‘astonishing ability to channel an art-history primer’s worth of artists. He uses the language of modernist abstraction like a palette: Matisse, Klee, Tanguy, Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock and Picasso – always Picasso, whose vocabulary is the basis for all the others’ (Laura Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’ in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat., New Museum, New York and Hayward Gallery, London, 2011, p. 24).
Yet Condo steers clear of straightforward appropriation, or anything that could subject him to accusations of being derivative; he goes far beyond homage and pastiche and instead reformulates the past through his unique aesthetic prism. ‘He is not a painter of appropriated imagery; nor is he a shoot-to-kill hunter of art-historical father figures. He is more like a philologist – a collector, admirer and lover of languages – in this case, languages of representation. […] Just as Manet would emulate – and send up – Titian, and Picasso would furiously tackle the subjects of Velázquez and Manet, Condo re-imagines Picasso’s portraits and de Kooning’s human-scapes as a challenge. Significantly, if one compares any one of Condo’s paintings directly with its putative source, one finds very little resemblance between them’ (Laura Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’, George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat., New Museum, New York and Hayward Gallery, London, 2011, pp. 24-27).
Indeed, despite the self-evident parallels between the Cubist master and Condo, the latter imbues his portraits with an additional layer of considerable inner complexity, which he describes with the self-coined neologism of Psychological Cubism. ‘Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states. Four of them can occur simultaneously… hysteria, joy, sadness, and desperation. If you could see these things at once that would be like what I’m trying to make you see in my art’ (George Condo, quoted in George Condo: Works on Paper, exh. cat., Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 2015, press release reproduced online). To look at a Condo is to embark on a rich, multi-layered experience which prompts new discoveries with every subsequent encounter, the pendulum swinging from the macabre to the carnivalesque. His influence can already be seen in the works of the generation which followed, such as John Currin, Glenn Brown and Lisa Yuskavage – a testament to their conviction in his enduring relevance.
Untitled underscores the centrality of works on paper within Condo’s oeuvre. Rejecting any notion of a hierarchy between the traditionally-separated media of canvas and paper, Condo is a true virtuoso, working across different formats, scales and surfaces. Here, Condo brazenly applies a medium typically limited to canvas to one typically used for pencil and ink, blurring further artistic boundaries which previously privileged demarcated categories.
Condo’s paintings have been the subject of several critically-lauded exhibitions, notably his spectacular travelling mid-career survey, Mental States (2011-12) at New York’s New Museum and London’s Hayward Gallery. His works on paper have been the subject of stand-alone shows, most recently the major retrospective, The Way I Think, at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC (2017) and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek (2017). Untitled is being presented on the heels of Condo’s participation at the 58th Venice Biennale this year.
