“The most consistent thing in my work is this idea of humanity. Of finding a way to represent the human consciousness in the representation through a portrait. That portrait could represent not only the exterior appearance of that person, but what’s going through their mind and what emotional states could be happening to them and within them.”
Visceral in application and metamorphic in composition, Blue Monumental Head powerfully captures the raw painterly dynamism and searing psychic intensity which characterize the very best of George Condo’s celebrated practice. A dizzying assemblage of forms and figures that collide and fragment, Blue Monumental Head obfuscates and blurs the traditional delineations between drawing and painting, finished and unfinished, balanced and unbalanced, flatness and sculptural depth to embody the kaleidoscopic complexities of human emotion. Test.mes nt to the lasting impact of Condo’s highly influential and experiential oeuvre, works by the artist reside in permanent collects ions of esteemed institutions including the Broad collects ion, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Tate Modern, London.
Exaggerated features and disjointed body parts careen across fragmented, abstract planes in Blue Monumental Head and reveal Condo’s most important touchstones–Old Master portraits, Picasso’s cubism, cartoon references. Heralding an unprecedented creative fervor of spontaneous mark-making, Blue Monumental Head departs from Condo’s more carefully planned portrait paintings toward a reckless embrace of the sketchy grit inherent in the alloyed mediums of sooty charcoal and pastel carved into wet acrylic. The painting emerges from Condo’s continued series of Drawing Paintings, in which the artist synergizes the traditionally separate processes of drawing and painting into one fluid gestural expression. In Condo’s words, the works “are about freedom of line and color and blur the distinction between drawing and painting… They are about beauty and horror walking hand in hand. They are about improvisation on the human figure and its consciousness.” (George Condo in: New York, Skarstedt Gallery, “George Condo: Drawing Paintings,” 2011 (press release) (online))
Market Precedent: George Condo’s Abstract Single Head Paintings
Essential to Condo’s artistic practice is a keen interest in inserting art historical tropes in a playful and absurd new context that simultaneously revives, and humorously undermines, the integrity of portraiture. In its masterful contusion of abstracted features, Blue Monumental Head evocatively recalls Pablo Picasso’s masterful Cubist facture. However, where Picasso radically shattered the picture plane to explore multiple viewpoints in the same moment, Condo ruptures his compositions to reveal the multifaceted and kaleidoscopic complexities of human emotion through his aptly self-termed mode of ‘psychological cubism’. As Condo explains: “I try to depict a character’s train of thoughts simultaneously – hysteria, joy, sadness, desperation… If you could see these things at once that would be like what I’m trying to make you see in my art.” (The artist quoted in: Stuart Jeffries, “George Condo: ‘I Was Delirious. Nearly Died’,” The Guardian, 10 February 2014, (online)) Blue Monumental Head sees Condo breaking down discrete characters, tinkering with their parts, and welding them back together in new and inventive configurations, ultimately producing a painting that, in its alluring visual chaos, serves as fitting test.mes nt to the infinite variety and complications of the human psyche.
Following a nine-month stint in Andy Warhol’s Factory, George Condo emerged onto the 1980s New York art scene alongside seminal figures such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Like Haring and Basquiat, Condo was critically engaged throughout the eighties in the inauguration of a new form of figurative painting that stylistically blended the representational and the abstract. Condo coined the terms ‘artificial realism’ and ‘psychological cubism’ to define his hybridization of art historical influences, specifically his fusion of the Old Master subject matter with the distorted geometric perspectives of Cubism. Through a prolific output of compelling yet grotesque portraits, Condo established himself by the turn of the century as one of the preeminent figurative painters of the contemporary era. Test.mes nt to this accomplishment, Condo’s method of extrapolating and distorting traditional figurative motifs through an abstract lens has influenced an entire generation of artists working today. As Holland Cotter noted in his review of George Condo: Mental States at the New Museum in 2011: “Mr. Condo is not a producer of single precious items consistent in style and long in the making. If that’s what you want from painting, he’ll disappoint you. He’s an artist of variety, plentitude and multiformity. He needs to be seen in an environment that presents him not as a virtuoso soloist but as the master of the massed chorale.” (Holland Cotter, “A Mind Where Picasso Meets Looney Tunes,” The New York t.mes s, 27 January 2011 (online))
“For Condo, things would appear to exist in terms of line, colour and form, life itself is form - form on the throes of ceaseless change, expansion, entanglement- form enamoured of its attendant colour-signs and subtly flowing or violently contrasting colour-textures… Rhythms interweave and join forces, successive dislocations and variations of colour define a chromatic ambience, forms expand and are controlled in the dynamism of the structural organisation.”
Blue Monumental Head revels in the unforeseen beauty and wildly alluring entropy of Condo’s improvisational genius. Exuding a psychological aura with gorgeous permutations of line, color, and form, Blue Monumental Head endures as a stunning reminder of Condo’s elusive genius in the act of abstraction. The gracefully churning collision of forms and emotions is striking: gleaming teeth, a wide smile, luminous eyes are combined with feelings of glee, rage, insanity and loneliness, conflated and ripped apart in perhaps one of the most honest and accurate representations of a complicated modern psychology. A captivating large-scale composition, Blue Monumental Head embodies the enticing painterly distillation that has cemented Condo’s place as one of the leading painters of his generation.
