“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.”
F ollowing 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. Testament 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 Times, 27 January 2011 (online))
Visceral in application and metamorphic in composition, Blue Portrait Composition captures the raw painterly dynamism and searing psychic intensity which characterize the very best of George Condo’s celebrated practice. An assemblage of forms and figures that collide and fragment, Blue Portrait Composition 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. Testament to the lasting impact of Condo’s highly influential and experiential oeuvre, works by the artist reside in permanent collections of esteemed institutions including the Broad Collection, 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.
