“In the beginning I took fragments of architecture to create a person, now I take a person and fragment them to make architecture.”
O ffering a spectrum of portraits presenting a compelling study into the artist’s unique and psychologically charged style of Artificial Realism, the present group of intimately scaled works spans the breadth of George Condo’s unique approach to contemporary portraiture. Launching his career as an assistant in Andy Warhol’s studio, Condo quickly learned how to draw from a variety of source material; encompassing references that span from the Renaissance to Modernism, and into the undeniable influence of contemporary pop culture. Assimilating these references into a transformative practice, Condo devises a unique approach to psychological portraiture, producing paintings that simultaneously allude and evade categorization. The result is a pantheon that is at once strange and familiar, experimental and fragmented; these enticing subjects are distinguished by their ballooning cheeks and bulbous noses, t.mes scent chins and globular eyes gracing this fleshed out collects ion of characters. 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).
The instantly recognizable style of Pablo Picasso dialogues directly with George Condo’s practice. Having studied Picasso’s work during his sojourn in Paris during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Condo absorbed the Cubist artist’s visual syntax into a unique pictorial vision. Like Condo, Picasso’s portraits simultaneously show various facial facets into a single two-dimensional plane; showcasing emotional depth while seeking to transform and reinvigorate portrait painting through the abstraction of features into solid geometric shapes. For both Picasso and Condo, this confrontation is not a process of destruction, but rather one of celebration, reverence and progression, as the represented profile transcends the naturalistic representation of their subjects. Condo’s use of portraiture has thus reinvigorated the genre through the creation of an aesthetic that unfolds with the dynamism of their subjects' inner nature.
Expressive figures composed through distended forms, the cast of characters are imbued with a sense of ineffable pathos. 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). Intimately scaled yet commanding in their presence, these studies offer an impressive archetype into Condo’s well established self-coined term of Artificial Realism. Through his portraits, Condo has mined the formal possibilities of art historical tropes as to push the boundaries of representation, in what the artist will call “ just a long series of experiments with life.”
