"I'm exaggerating and personifying some of their extreme emotional vicissitudes [...] And I love the freedom to capture that in painting, where it’s like, these are the limits of hysteria, these are the limits of humanity, this is how far people really take it, and how far I see them take it. And I guess that was the other thing I got from Picasso. It’s the idea of Cubism—but rather than seeing and depicting this coffee cup, say, from four different angles at the same t.mes
, I’m seeing a personality from multiple angles at once. Instead of space being my subject, I’m painting all of someone’s emotional potentialities at once, and that’s what I’d call Psychological Cubism."
George Condo
"I'm exaggerating and personifying some of their extreme emotional vicissitudes [...] And I love the freedom to capture that in painting, where it’s like, these are the limits of hysteria, these are the limits of humanity, this is how far people really take it, and how far I see them take it. And I guess that was the other thing I got from Picasso. It’s the idea of Cubism—but rather than seeing and depicting this coffee cup, say, from four different angles at the same t.mes , I’m seeing a personality from multiple angles at once. Instead of space being my subject, I’m painting all of someone’s emotional potentialities at once, and that’s what I’d call Psychological Cubism."
A maverick of the contemporary art world, George Condo’s visually and psychologically forceful portraits have solidified him as one of the most inventive artists of the generation. Condo is a puppeteer of the human psyche: “I want to capture the characters in these paintings at the extreme height of whatever moment they are in – in that static moment of chaos – and to picture them as abstract compositions that are set in destitute places and isolated rooms” (the artist in an interview with Ralph Rugoff, in George Condo: Existential Portraits, exh. cat., New York, Luhring Augustine, 2006, p. 8).
With today’s audience accust.mes d to large-scale installations, performance art and political stat.mes nts defining contemporary art, George Condo returns to the art historical tradition of figurative painting. Faced with the declaration of the ‘death of painting’, many artists have struggled to truly champion the medium in recent decades. However, Condo’s vast oeuvre, spanning over thirty years, boldly reasserts the significance of figuration and of painting within contemporary art.
George Condo emerged onto the 1980s art scene in New York alongside the seminal figures of contemporary painting, such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Similar to the two young pioneers, Condo was critically engaged with creating and developing a new form of figurative painting, one that.mes rged the representational and the abstract. Since the beginning of his career, Condo has pioneered a hybrid-topography of the human figure that allows him to explore the tenets of psychology and philosophy.
Condo’s art poses a fascinating dichotomy between its kitsch aesthetics and the skilled deployment of oil painting. Drawing influence from expansive regions, Condo blends styles and motifs from different eras of art history. Renaissance portraiture, cubism, surrealism, comic books; Condo assimilates his references into striking, psychologically charged scenes: “I love the idea of two incompatible worlds brought together – opposing forces harmonically melded” (George Condo cited in: Diane Solway, ‘Musings on a Muse’, W Magazine, January 2013, online). Condo’s amalgam of art history and contemporary culture is utterly unique, his fragmented facial landscapes call to mind the genius of Pablo Picasso and Francis Bacon.
"I believe that painting needs to transform in order for it to become interesting for each and every generation, but I think of it more in terms of being liberated by history. Liberated by what has come before."
GEORGE CONDO, CITED IN, RALPH RUGOFF, ‘THE ENIGMA OF JEAN LOUIS’, GEORGE CONDO: EXISTENTIAL PORTRAITS, BERLIN 2006, P. 7.
"I believe that painting needs to transform in order for it to become interesting for each and every generation, but I think of it more in terms of being liberated by history. Liberated by what has come before."
Painted in his signature style ‘Psychological Cubism’, as Condo refers to it, The Dream is a quintessential example of the artist’s ability to capture multiple states of mind in a figure at once. Splicing images and splitting his figure’s faces, Condo’s paintings offer visual complexities that evoke the feeling of a fever dream. Amorphous faces, toothy grins and cartoonish eyes populate the present work as Condo straddles the familiar and the uncanny. The glowing red background - a favourite of the artist - heightens the painting’s fervent eroticism, calling upon the viewer to decide whether they feel lust or disgust. Removing his characters from any sense of reality, he creates a pictorial void for his psychological explorations. Fusing traditions of art history with the anxieties of contemporary society, George Condo has succeeded in reviving figurative painting in the 21st century.
‘The traditional opposition between abstraction and figuration is now no longer pertinent: it has more to do with ideology than with the ‘art of painting’. The contribution made by George Condo is exemplary in this respect. Although totally immersed in the image culture of the late twentieth century, his painting is still informed by modernist questions concerning the uncertain status of representation’ (Bernard Marcadé, quoted in Simon Baker, Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 109).