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Lot Essay
George Condo explores the liminal space between the beautiful and the grotesque, the familiar and the bizarre, the figurative and the abstract. His unique style of painting synthesizes diverse styles and movements of art history, simultaneously channeling Renaissance and Baroque sensibilities in conjunction with Cubism, Pop, Abstract Expressionism and Surrealism. Condo’s main interest is in depicting different cerebral states: “I describe what I do as psychological cubism. Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states” (G. Condo, quoted in S. Jeffries, “George Condo: ‘I was delirious. I nearly died,’” The Guardian, February 10, 2014).
The organized defunctionalization of the state being commonly known as “multiheaded hydratic combustion” often found lurching in the schisms of a fractured daydream embodies this exploration of play and fragmentation that can concurrently exist within the mind. A blank face with elongated neck occupies the center of the composition while a second midnight monstrous face emerges from behind. These two characters morph into a rectangular machine with protruding geometric forms and planes. Bulbous shapes extend from the sides and a ribbed extension protrudes on the lower right acting as both gear and tail, confounding the distinctions between beast, man and machine. Above the shifting faces, strange colorful spheres catapult through the air while other forms extend vertically. Together they seem to enact a choreographed, rhythmic dance. One red circle, characteristic of Condo’s clown-like noses, hovers above the scene and has sprouted dark black hairs. The scene occurs against a burnt orange background, which signifies neither time nor space but serves to amplify the vibrating purple, red and green tones whose combination charges the painting with a pulse of electricity. Overall, Condo handles the paint with thoughtful finesse and spirited improvisation demonstrating his technical skill as a painter. He is able to maintain the seriousness of his craft while adding zany details that further substantiate his artistic prowess. The title itself offers a complex and amusing key to understanding this work. Condo presents the viewer with a paradox of a composed yet non-functional mental state he appropriately names the “multiheaded hydratic combustion.” Visually and linguistically, Condo slyly offers a union of opposites, a melding of water and fire, a possibility that can exist only in the fissures of a daydream.
Condo is heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and John Cage and has incorporated the beat poet’s spontaneous style of prose into his process of painting. As the bass player for the punk rock band called The Girls, Condo met Jean-Michel Basquiat and decided to move to New York in the 1980s becoming close friends with Keith Haring. Unlike his contemporaries of the East Village scene, Condo does not share the same graffiti-inspired aesthetic. Condo instead imbibes his work with a fusion of Modernist art movements. In the present work, one can spy elements of Picasso, Miró and Bacon. This piece is essential in the overall schema of Condo’s oeuvre because it is both a portrait of an imaginary character in the similar vein of his quirky series of “fake Old Master” paintings and his intricate, abstract “expanding” canvases. In addition, this painting exemplifies Condo’s dark sense of humor and his mischievous sense of intellectual play. Condo probes the outer reaches of inner space.
George Condo has discovered how to utilize art history in a way that transcends simple appropriation. His rare talent allows him to both conceptually and technically integrate disparate artistic lineages into a new synthetic whole. This painting typifies Condo’s style of “artificial realism”—meaning the realistic representation of that which is artificial—through the combination of bestial, human and mechanical components. He probes the interior world of the mind and plays in the schisms of the collective unconscious to reflect back truths of our contemporary culture. As Burroughs succinctly explains about Condo’s artistic practice, the “function of the artist or any creative thinker is to make people aware of what they know and don’t know that they know” (W. Burroughs, George Condo: recent paintings, Pace Gallery, exh. cat., New York, 1994, p. 1).
The organized defunctionalization of the state being commonly known as “multiheaded hydratic combustion” often found lurching in the schisms of a fractured daydream embodies this exploration of play and fragmentation that can concurrently exist within the mind. A blank face with elongated neck occupies the center of the composition while a second midnight monstrous face emerges from behind. These two characters morph into a rectangular machine with protruding geometric forms and planes. Bulbous shapes extend from the sides and a ribbed extension protrudes on the lower right acting as both gear and tail, confounding the distinctions between beast, man and machine. Above the shifting faces, strange colorful spheres catapult through the air while other forms extend vertically. Together they seem to enact a choreographed, rhythmic dance. One red circle, characteristic of Condo’s clown-like noses, hovers above the scene and has sprouted dark black hairs. The scene occurs against a burnt orange background, which signifies neither time nor space but serves to amplify the vibrating purple, red and green tones whose combination charges the painting with a pulse of electricity. Overall, Condo handles the paint with thoughtful finesse and spirited improvisation demonstrating his technical skill as a painter. He is able to maintain the seriousness of his craft while adding zany details that further substantiate his artistic prowess. The title itself offers a complex and amusing key to understanding this work. Condo presents the viewer with a paradox of a composed yet non-functional mental state he appropriately names the “multiheaded hydratic combustion.” Visually and linguistically, Condo slyly offers a union of opposites, a melding of water and fire, a possibility that can exist only in the fissures of a daydream.
Condo is heavily influenced by Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and John Cage and has incorporated the beat poet’s spontaneous style of prose into his process of painting. As the bass player for the punk rock band called The Girls, Condo met Jean-Michel Basquiat and decided to move to New York in the 1980s becoming close friends with Keith Haring. Unlike his contemporaries of the East Village scene, Condo does not share the same graffiti-inspired aesthetic. Condo instead imbibes his work with a fusion of Modernist art movements. In the present work, one can spy elements of Picasso, Miró and Bacon. This piece is essential in the overall schema of Condo’s oeuvre because it is both a portrait of an imaginary character in the similar vein of his quirky series of “fake Old Master” paintings and his intricate, abstract “expanding” canvases. In addition, this painting exemplifies Condo’s dark sense of humor and his mischievous sense of intellectual play. Condo probes the outer reaches of inner space.
George Condo has discovered how to utilize art history in a way that transcends simple appropriation. His rare talent allows him to both conceptually and technically integrate disparate artistic lineages into a new synthetic whole. This painting typifies Condo’s style of “artificial realism”—meaning the realistic representation of that which is artificial—through the combination of bestial, human and mechanical components. He probes the interior world of the mind and plays in the schisms of the collective unconscious to reflect back truths of our contemporary culture. As Burroughs succinctly explains about Condo’s artistic practice, the “function of the artist or any creative thinker is to make people aware of what they know and don’t know that they know” (W. Burroughs, George Condo: recent paintings, Pace Gallery, exh. cat., New York, 1994, p. 1).