GEORGE CONDO | Untitled

signed and dated 2013

Skarstedt Gallery, New York (acquired directly from the artist)
Acquired by the present owner from the above

"I think the whole act of making art has nothing to do with the medium within which you work … You can paint, draw, write, etc., but the act itself always remains the same."

George Condo


A rich conflation of myriad shapes, colors and lines, Untitled from 2013 represents a brilliant fusion of many of George Condo’s most important touchstones: Old Master portraits, his own brand of ‘psychological Cubism,’ cartoon references, and a commitment to constantly pushing the boundaries between figurative and non-representational painting. The portrait is a remarkable example of the artist’s celebrated Drawing Paintings, a series that he has fastidiously worked on since 2009. Titled Drawing Paintings for their marked shift away from the traditional medium of oil paint to the more ‘sketchy’ materials of acrylic, charcoal, and pastel, these works are, according to Condo, “about freedom of line and colour [that] 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 cited in Press Release, New York, Skarstedt Gallery, George Condo: Drawing Paintings, November 2011, online). These intriguing works continue to draw on techniques and styles of his Modernist predecessors while exploring what he has called ‘abstract figuration’. When he began the series of Drawing Paintings, Condo was looking to move away from “all those pods and peripheral beings I’ve been working on over the last decade” and “to bring back more naturalistic faces and bodies” (George Condo cited in Calvin Tomkins, ‘Portraits of Imaginary People: How George Condo Reclaimed Old Master Painting’, The New Yorker, 17 January 2011, p. 65). Indeed, whilst the face of Multicolored Portrait slowly melds, morphs and dissolves into a geometric being, the figure’s pose is naturalistic and demure in the manner of a classical Old Master Portrait.

Following a nine-month stint as the diamond duster in Andy Warhol’s infamous Factory, George Condo emerged onto the 1980s New York art scene at the eager age of twenty-three alongside seminal figures Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, the latter of whom is stated to have officially convinced Condo to pursue a career as a professional artist. 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. Since the early 1980s, Condo has pioneered a specific hybrid-topography of the human figure, inventing a fictional schema as a means to explore the tenets of subjectivity. Born of an intense dialogue between art history and popular culture, Condo’s paintings conjure stylistic traits that are absorbed from a multitude of canonical influences. The artist’s first mature painting, The Madonna, 1982, an Old Master–style portrait, launched Condo on a career-long exploration of hybridised historical styles and genres. Spanning from Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Ingres, Manet, Goya, Velázquez, 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. Yet, instead of merely copying these styles, Condo appropriates and internalises a multiplicity of pictorial languages to construct a new, contemporary vision of painting: “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). The resulting dichotomy of traditional artistic practice and eccentric subject matter has resulted in a dynamic collection of portraits in all shapes, forms, and colours, revealing the complex and fractured psychological states of his subjects behind the surface of the image.

Beginning from around 2008, Condo embarked on a series of Drawing Paintings that synergizes the traditionally separate processes of drawing and painting into one fluid gestural expression, embracing the sketchy grit inherent in the alloyed mediums of sooty charcoal and pastel carved into wet acrylic. Heralding an unprecedented mode of spontaneous mark-making, the continuing body of work would go on to become one of his most important series. As Simon Baker explains: “The idea of uniting drawing and painting on a single canvas arose from Condo’s recognition of the need for immediacy and improvisation with line and gesture but can also be understood as contingent upon the increasing importance of the contrapuntal balance of working at different speeds and rhythms on the same work […] the layered process Condo devised for the Drawing Paintings is important because in purely technical terms, it builds in and amplifies the operations of chance and reconfiguration to produce what Condo refers to as ‘reconfigurations of drawing’” (Simon Baker, George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 152). Summarizing Condo’s protracted yet spontaneous and intuitive methodology of layering, drawing, sketching, blending and blotting until a series of interlocking form sand colours emerge, Baker observes: “This heightened sense of equality between media, painting and pastel (or charcoal), which have historically occupied different niches, is a significant and original feature of the Drawing Paintings” (Ibid.).

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; his method of extrapolating and distorting traditional figurative motifs through an abstract lens has influenced an entire generation of artists working today. Untitled reveals the illustrious glory and ingenuity of an artist in the surging height of his career, marvelling in Condo’s intellectual game that obfuscates the traditional delineations between drawing and painting, the finished and unfinished, balanced and unbalanced, and flat two-dimensionality versus sculptural depth. In the Cubist topography of the figure’s face, sensuous line and Cézanne-like passages of flat color overlap in a densely layered web of unrestrained abstraction, rejecting the inherent concept of purely-figurative portraiture and emphasizing the two-dimensionality of the canvas’ surface; at the same time, the asymmetrically hued background manipulates the conventional figure-ground relationship to an extent that takes on a nearly sculptural dimensionality. The gridlock and patchwork that try to disclose Condo’s narrative also belie the integrity of its full meaning: as viewers, we are provoked to enter through the portal into a space where “beauty and horror” coexist, as the artist so claims, yet just because we are invited into Condo’s world does not mean we can grasp it. Exuding a mystifyingly psychological aura with gorgeous permutations of line, color, and form, Untitled endures as a stunning reminder of Condo’s elusive genius in the act of abstraction.