A kaleidoscope of brilliant colors and surging forms, Green Head Composition is a paradigm of George Condo’s career-long exploration of and engagement with figurative painting in the twenty-first century. Within the fractured realm of the present work, abstraction and figuration collide with thrilling velocity before the viewer’s eyes; while clearly discernable, the silhouette of the central figure evades clear articulation, as Condo deftly manipulates our ability to read the image before us. Green Head Composition is extraordinary for its vibrant coloration, compositional intricacy, and rich surface of expressionistic brushwork. Between the melee of exaggerated features and fragmented, abstract planes, flashes of the artist’s most important motifs are clearly discernable: Old Master portraits, his own brand of ‘psychological Cubism,’ cartoon references, and a commitment to constantly pushing the boundaries that separate figurative and non-representational painting.

The present work thus marvels in Condo’s intellectual game that obfuscates and blurs the traditional delineations between drawing and painting, finished and unfinished, balanced and unbalanced, and flat two-dimensionality versus sculptural depth. The gracefully churning collision of forms is perhaps one of the most honest and accurate representations of a complicated modern psychology: glee, rage, smiles, insanity, cheeks, loneliness, and eyes crushed together in an almost unbearable state of being. Condo has established himself in the canon of Western art history as a master puppeteer of the human psyche, presenting to his audience forms that delight and repulse, amuse and sadden, welcome and alienate. His unraveling and subsequent reassembly of various pictorial languages has cemented him as one of today’s most clever and cutting-edge contemporary painters.

Like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Condo was critically engaged throughout the eighties in a new form of figurative painting that stylistically blended the representational and the abstract. As he continued to develop his personal style, Condo coined the terms ‘artificial realism’ and ‘psychological cubism’ to define his hybridization of art historical influences, specifically to portray his fusion of the Old Master subject with the geometric perspectives of Cubism. Since then, Condo has continued to mine the formal possibilities of art historical tropes to push the boundaries and defy expectations for both painting and portraiture in a modern setting. Building upon years of refining and maturing his iconic figurative style, Green Head Composition reveals an artist now at the height of his career, utterly uninhibited and full of instinctive creative fervor. Now more than ever, he insists on painting as a vehicle to show the inherent absurdity of contemporary life. As the artist has stated, “I see today’s world as it is! Absurd and exaggerated—and I need to turn it into something truthful. As an artist you are a mirror, but simply reflecting today’s culture is not enough, it has to come through as a visual correction” (George Condo cited in: Dorian May, “Portrait of an Artist. George Condo,” Vanity Fair, 5 July 2018).