Surreal and fantastical, Urban Figure Composition, forms one of George Condo’s most scrupulous investigations into the possibilities and boundaries of figurative painting. A symphony of art historical references unravel across the canvas, teetering on the verge of abstraction. Here, Condo embraces absurdity with open arms, delving into a world of pictorial gibberish that is as rigorously psychological as it is humorous.

Executed in 1996, in Urban Figure Composition Condo wholeheartedly abandons conventional pictorial narrative, leaning instead towards his own grotesque and fantastical inventions. Rendered in the artists’ inimitable collaged visual language, Condo offers a figure, or perhaps a jumble of figures, flanked by a cold and severe brick wall. Yet, the longer one stands before this painting, the more bizarre and fantastic details emerge. The painting denies any sense of claritys ; what at first glance appears to be a fence dissolves into a row of crosses, and what may be two figures in a window, might just as easily be two animals behind bars. Clad with a toothy smile and jettisoning limbs, Condo’s central figure belies the representational associations of conventional portraiture. Condo oscillates between the highly finished and the crudely executed, offering a dizzying patchwork of uniquely reinterpreted visual quotations and representations. Condo offers us utter pictorial opacity at its very best; a schizophrenic marriage of horror, pathos and humour.

Condo’s figurative work can be described in part as an assault upon the traditions of portraiture. In Urban Figure Composition, Condo offers a psychedelic portrait singing with art historical references layered so deeply, that all sense of meaning collapses in on itself. In the present work, Condo quotes from a great multitude of artistic forefathers, from Pablo Picasso’s cubist portraits, to Willem de Kooning’s women and Jean Dubuffet’s personnages. In his own words, “the only way for me to feel the difference between every other artist and me is to use every artist to become me’ (George Condo cited in Stuart Jeffries, ‘George Condo: “I was delirious. Nearly died”’, The Guardian, 10 February 2014, online). The result is an unprecedented visual lexicon that is at once both ghoulish and ghastly. Condo takes us to the very edge of art history, only to reflect and reinforce the greatest masters of the canon. As curator Laura Hoptman explains “he is not a painter of appropriated imagery… He is more like a philologist – a collects or, admirer and lover of languages – in this case, languages of representation” (Laura Hoptman cited in: Exh. Cat., New Museum, George Condo: Mental States, 2011, pp. 26-27). Condo’s oeuvre has and continues to be wholly unique and ultimately unclassifiable, appropriating and recontextualising the art of the past.