Celebrated for his surrealist.mes nagerie of archetypal figures, George Condo’s eminent style is characterised by an unprecedented visual lexicon that is both ghoulish and ghastly, and infused with a comedic sense of the macabre. Expressing a cynical attitude based on pure fantasy, his dream-like creations espouse a technical virtuosity, in turn assimilating the entire range of major modern artists’ creative output. Departing from the aesthetic confines of figuration, Condo explores the myriad of portrayals that enunciate the inner psyche, seeking to depict a psychological state of mind. Executed in 1994, Untitled is quintessentially Condo. It is both a remarkable synthesis of art history and the grotesque, and an extraordinary examination of the deepest recesses of the psychological. Since the early 1980s, Condo has pioneered a hybrid-topography of the human figure, inventing a fictional schema to explore the tenets of subjectivity.

In the present work, physiognomies and outward appearances coincide. Depicting a celebration or perhaps an inauguration of sorts, Untitled offers an assembly of characters from yesteryear. Across a spectrum of peasants, ladies, and royalty; a regal figure commands authority as a crowd looks on in adoration. Hovering above, a mythological cherub is accompanied by a curious halo of somber grey. Tones of green, yellow, and orange dominate the picture plane, in which a heated and smoky sky utilises pathetic fallacy to unease the viewer. Navigating an uncanny visual lexicon, Condo's chimeric beings emotively deliver a schizophrenic marriage of horror, pathos and humour to expose intense psychic states.

There is a long lineage of art historical predecessors that made the present work possible, for example, Picabia caricaturing the history of painting, the Equipo Chronica group, Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe and De Chirico pastiching chromolithography in his late works. Indeed, critics have commented that Dali, Matta, Picasso, Polke, Pollock, Daumier, Arcimboldo, Motherwell, Gorki, Lam, Ensor, Miro and Klee are all discernible within Condo’s artistic production. The openness of influence attests to the fact that Condo’s oeuvre has and continues to be wholly unique and ultimately unclassifiable, in which his art re-appropriates the potential contained in the works of the past.

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, Untitled reveals an artist at the height of his career, utterly uninhibited and full of instinctive creative fervor.