Offering a spectrum of portraits that spans the gamut of George Condo’s unique approach to contemporary portraiture, the present 10 portraits utterly define the artist’s unique and psychologically charged style of ‘artificial realism’ that has won him critical acclaim. Since the beginning of his career as a painter in the late 1980s, Condo has drawn from a wealth of sources spanning the Renaissance and Baroque periods, to the Surrealist and Cubist movements, through to the influence of contemporary comics and cartoons. Assimilating these various influences to form a totally unique and psychological form of portraiture, Condo produces paintings that simultaneously allude to and evade categorisation. The result is a pantheon that is at once strange and familiar, experimental and fragmented; portrait subjects distinguished by their ballooning cheeks and bulbus noses, t.mes scent chins and globular eyes. Describings his transmutable style, the artist has explained: “In the beginning I took fragments of architecture to create a person, now I take a person and fragment them to make architecture” (G. Condo cited in: L. Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’ in: Exh. Cat., New York, New Museum, George Condo: Mental States, New York, 2011, p. 24).

There is a clear dialogue with the work of Pablo Picasso in Condo’s practice. In style, technique and composition, the present works are prime examples of Condo’s transfiguration of Picasso’s indomitable style. Having studied Picasso’s work as a young painter living in Paris in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Condo absorbed much of the elder artist’s pictorial syntax. While Picasso’s cubist portraits of his muses and mistresses simultaneously show various facets of their facial features on a single two-dimensional plane, Condo reapplies the technique of analytical cubism to his own paintings, showing different and often conflicting psychological states that are melded with borrowings from Pop culture. What brings both artists together, however, is a persistent reinvestigation into the possibilities of portraiture. Indeed, much like Picasso in his t.mes , Condo has sought to transform and reinvigorate portrait painting throughout his career. For both, this confrontation is not a process of destruction, but rather one of celebration, reverence and progression. Within the conventionally established parameters of classical portraiture, these artists have innovated from the inside out.

Despite their cartoonish and distended forms, the cast of characters that populate Condo’s portraits are imbued with a sense of ineffable pathos. As curator Ralph Rugoff notes, “Unlike in caricature… the preposterous features of these figures are in fact rendered with great sympathy. Drawing on the traditional rhetoric of portraiture, Condo imbues his invented subjects with a compelling psychological presence” (R. Rugoff, ‘The Mental States of America’ in: Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, George Condo: Mental States, 2011-2012, p. 16). Each intimately scaled yet commanding portrait study here offers an impressive archetype of Condo’s well established self-coined term ‘artificial realism’, through which he has expanded the traditional realm of figurative painting to portray the often-humorous idiosyncrasies of contemporary life. Here, we are presented with a brilliant compendium of the artist’s rebuttal of the classical tradition: quasi-human figures offer an ingenious amalgam of elements borrowed from European Old Master paintings right through the cartoon aesthetic and commercial realm of Popular culture. As readily present in these portraits, throughout his practice, Condo has mined the formal possibilities of art historical tropes to push the boundaries and defy expectations for both painting and portraiture reflective of our contemporary moment.