George Condo

Luhring Augustine, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2006

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is very slightly lighter in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals very minor rubbing to the corners and the right of the overturn top edge, and a very small loss towards the bottom left corner. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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"The figure is somehow the content and the non-content, the absolute collision of styles and the interruption of one direction by another, almost like channels being changed on the television set before you ever see what is on.  All this adds up to one image, and most of the time, that image is a woman." (the artist cited in: 'Thomas Kellein Interview with George Condo, New York, 15 April 2004', in: Exhibition Catalogue, Salzburg, Museum der Moderne Salzberg, George Condo: 100 Women, 2005, p.31)

 

Belonging to the highly acclaimed series of Existential Portraits executed during 2005-2006, Alpine Waitress of 2006 bears witness to the fantastical hybridisation unique to George Condo's extraordinarily inventive treatment of the contemporary psyche. Instrumental in the international revival of painting since 1982, Condo emerged from the East Village art scene in New York alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. In the early 1980s, following a period spent working on the silk-screens at Warhol's Factory, the artist travelled to California, Paris and Cologne in the pursuit of his inimitable tragicomic style: a remarkable synthesis of art-history, the grotesque and the pathetic, Condo's hallucinatory repertoire breaches logic, time and corporeality to penetrate the deepest recesses of the psychological. This year, the artist's first major institutional retrospective opened at the New Museum, New York to sensational critical acclaim; entitled George Condo: Mental States this comprehensive exhibition is soon to open in October at the Hayward Gallery on London's Southbank.  Hailed by the New York Times as the "missing link" between Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston and the new transmutation of figure painting led by John Currin and Glenn Brown, Condo possesses a singularly pivotal and authoritative voice within American and European art today. (Holland Cotter, 'A Mind Where Picasso Meets Looney Tunes' in: New York Times, January 27 2011).

 

Ever since the mid-1980s, George Condo has pioneered a hybrid-topography of the human figure as a means of approaching subjectivity through an invented fictional synthesis; a concept Condo has termed "Artificial Realism" (the artist cited in: Ralph Rugoff, 'The Enigma of Jean Louis' in: Exhibition Catalogue, New York, Luhring Augustine Gallery, George Condo: Existential Portraits, 2006, p. 8). Forged in an intense dialectic with art history and popular culture, Condo simultaneously conjures stylistic traits absorbed from a multitude of canonical influences to dismantle one reality as means of engendering another. Ranging from Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Ingres, Manet, Goya, Velazquez, Géricault, to caricature, comics and the Looney Tunes, Condo draws from an enormous repository of pictorial signifiers, corporeally melding their protean features into a unique brand of psychologically charged portraiture. Navigating an abject and uncanny terrain, Condo's chimerical beings emotively deliver a schizoid comingling of horror, pathos and humour to expose intense psychic states, archetypal of the despair inherent to the collective human condition. The artist's imaginary sitters disturbingly evidence a fluid anamorphous amalgamation of incoherent body parts construed by the creative faculty of Condo's expansive memory bank. Ralph Rugoff outlines that alongside the recurrent Picasso-esque conflation of two profile views, "chins and necks melt together to form disarming swathes of flesh; cheeks balloon into myriad tumourous shapes; ragged rows of teeth flash unexpectedly from displaced orifices. Yet however odd and fantastical these beings seem, Condo's careful modelling gives them the appearance of volume-displacing, three-dimensional figures who occupy a space identical to our own." (Ralf Rugoff, The Imaginary Portraits of George Condo, New York 2002, p. 11).  

 

The present work, Alpine Waitress evinces this uncanny humanistic element; although incoherently assembled, her visage articulates an immediate emphatic address to the viewer. The absurd erectile fusion of neck and head, swelling misalignment of cheek, forehead, and rodent-like ears delivers an unnervingly comic cogency steeped in pathos.  The imploring stare of the eyes and cavernous gape of the mouth simultaneously invoke a conflation of Picasso's twin-profiles with a clowning of Bacons existentially screaming popes. Set against a scumbled background redolent of much nineteenth-century portraiture, evocative in this case of Théodore Géricault's portrait of an insane asylum patient, Condo draws out our sympathies in a rhythmic stuttering between attraction and repulsion. As posited by Rugoff, these women are "not abject nudes, however, but antipodal females wearing jewellery and elegant dresses, as though they were going out on a hot date." Utterly innocent of her repellent appearance, Alpine Waitress is at once "ridiculous and shatteringly pathetic", charting the course between laughter and disaster. (Ibid., p. 12).

 

The schizoid clashing of styles and juxtaposition of incongruent parts locates Condo's hybrid painting very much in line with William Burroughs' literary technique. Indeed, Burroughs and Condo worked together in co-publishing The Ghost of Change for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1991, with Condo cooperating closely with Burroughs to supply the illustrations to his short story.  Idol of the Beat generation and author of Naked Lunch (1959), Burroughs' hallucinatory suspension of syntactical logic and cut-up procedure is reflected not only in the compositional basis of Condo's painting but also, as Margrit Brehim has argued, "with a view to the psychology of the depicted pictures.  Neither Burroughs' books nor Condo's paintings have anything to do with narrative linearity, but rather with instantaneous states." (Margrit Breghm, 'Tradition as Temptation. An Approach to the "George Condo Method"', in: Exhibition Catalogue, Salzburg, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, George Condo: 100 Women, 2005, p.24). 

 

Like Matisse and Picasso before him, Condo finds his greatest subject in the portrayal of the female form. Herein, the present work truly evinces the artist's innovative approach to female corporeality.  Beautifully painted, the buxom Alpine Waitress amalgamates abject eroticism and formal virtuosity set within the historical tradition of portrait painting.  Farcical though she may seem, Condo's Alpine Waitress is a consummate exemplification of Condo's ingenious transformation of disparate parts inventively fused together to instantaneously evoke a direct translation of the human psyche and contemporary reality.