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Lot Essay
George Condo’s Pink and Yellow Sweep is an intoxicating example of the artist’s ability to coax emotional tension by mixing together figuration and abstraction. In this 2011 painting, a series of animated eyes stare out through an amalgamation of nebulous shapes. Discussing this confluence of figures, Condo remarked, “I wanted to capture the characters in these paintings at the extreme height of whatever moment they’re in—in that static moment of chaos—and to picture them as abstract compositions that are set in destitute places and isolated rooms. Everything takes place in a relatively impoverished kind of situation” (G. Condo, quoted in R. Rugoff, “The Enigma of Jean Louis: Interview 14 March 2006”, George Condo: Existential Portraits: Sculpture, Drawings, Paintings 2005⁄2006, exh. cat., Luhring Augustine, New York, 2006, p. 8). Crystallizing a moment of energy and chaos, paintings such as Pink and Yellow Sweep freeze time and represent a convergence of physical matter and kinetic energy.
At first glance, one is confronted with a mix of swooping lines that intersect and connect as they form abstract shapes that give body to the applications of paint underneath. Washes of yellow and pale pink are cut with areas of white, black, and gray-blue that push against each other in Condo’s active canvas. Taking shape in this turmoil, a host of faces and figures yearn to make themselves known. The artist renders pairs of eyes, toothy grins, and floppy ears amid his curvilinear marks so that seemingly random shapes are transformed by our own pareidolia into manic visages. Speaking to this point, curator Laura Hoptman notes, “Realistic details … struggle to emerge from the rich atmosphere of line and Cézannesque passage that comprise the backgrounds. It is as if this painterly primordial soup is tugging these figurative forms back into itself, impeding their complete transformation from shapes into images” (L. Hoptman, “Abstraction as a State of Mind” in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. New Museum, New York, 2011, p.23). Paintings such as the present example are indicative of Condo’s larger interest in transitory realms between action and reaction, the real world and representation.
Condo’s oeuvre is rife with allusions to the history of art, and the artist himself consciously mines the styles of his forebearers in order to reposition and question the nature of painting. In the late 1980s, he introduced figures from the tradition of Spanish court portraiture into his bizarre realms as a means of further probing their psychological contexts. Likewise, he often references artists like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró as he recontextualizes the legacies of Cubist and Surrealist painting. Condo’s affinity for Picasso is especially revelatory in works like Pink and Yellow Sweep as he seeks to depict multiple moments, angles, and fields of vision in one two-dimensional plane. “My painting is all about this interchangeability of languages in art”, Condo has offered, “where one second you might feel the background has the shading and tonalities you would see in a Rembrandt portrait, but the subject is completely different and painted like some low-culture, transgressive mutation of a comic strip” (G. Condo, quoted in J. Belcove, “George Condo interview”, in Financial Times, April 21, 2013). The multifaceted approaches of analytical cubism merge with cartoon exaggeration and a knack for instilling emotional fervor in each stroke of the brush. Combined, these elements coalesce into a potent treatise on the continued growth and evolution of the painted image.
As a highly accomplished example of George Condo’s unique style of painting, Pink and Yellow Sweep is an important contribution to the resurgence in figurative painting. A generation of contemporary painters such as John Currin, Glenn Brown and Lisa Yuskavage have all acknowledged a debt of gratitude to Condo, for appreciating the traditions of painting, while not being suffocated by them, and in turn, developing a whole new set of rules and practices. Condo uses his inimitable technique to reassess centuries of painterly tradition in a radical new way, and by combining the past with a more contemporaneous narrative, paintings such as this have done much to reinvigorate figurative painting and return the human figure to its central position in the modern art historical canon.
At first glance, one is confronted with a mix of swooping lines that intersect and connect as they form abstract shapes that give body to the applications of paint underneath. Washes of yellow and pale pink are cut with areas of white, black, and gray-blue that push against each other in Condo’s active canvas. Taking shape in this turmoil, a host of faces and figures yearn to make themselves known. The artist renders pairs of eyes, toothy grins, and floppy ears amid his curvilinear marks so that seemingly random shapes are transformed by our own pareidolia into manic visages. Speaking to this point, curator Laura Hoptman notes, “Realistic details … struggle to emerge from the rich atmosphere of line and Cézannesque passage that comprise the backgrounds. It is as if this painterly primordial soup is tugging these figurative forms back into itself, impeding their complete transformation from shapes into images” (L. Hoptman, “Abstraction as a State of Mind” in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. New Museum, New York, 2011, p.23). Paintings such as the present example are indicative of Condo’s larger interest in transitory realms between action and reaction, the real world and representation.
Condo’s oeuvre is rife with allusions to the history of art, and the artist himself consciously mines the styles of his forebearers in order to reposition and question the nature of painting. In the late 1980s, he introduced figures from the tradition of Spanish court portraiture into his bizarre realms as a means of further probing their psychological contexts. Likewise, he often references artists like Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró as he recontextualizes the legacies of Cubist and Surrealist painting. Condo’s affinity for Picasso is especially revelatory in works like Pink and Yellow Sweep as he seeks to depict multiple moments, angles, and fields of vision in one two-dimensional plane. “My painting is all about this interchangeability of languages in art”, Condo has offered, “where one second you might feel the background has the shading and tonalities you would see in a Rembrandt portrait, but the subject is completely different and painted like some low-culture, transgressive mutation of a comic strip” (G. Condo, quoted in J. Belcove, “George Condo interview”, in Financial Times, April 21, 2013). The multifaceted approaches of analytical cubism merge with cartoon exaggeration and a knack for instilling emotional fervor in each stroke of the brush. Combined, these elements coalesce into a potent treatise on the continued growth and evolution of the painted image.
As a highly accomplished example of George Condo’s unique style of painting, Pink and Yellow Sweep is an important contribution to the resurgence in figurative painting. A generation of contemporary painters such as John Currin, Glenn Brown and Lisa Yuskavage have all acknowledged a debt of gratitude to Condo, for appreciating the traditions of painting, while not being suffocated by them, and in turn, developing a whole new set of rules and practices. Condo uses his inimitable technique to reassess centuries of painterly tradition in a radical new way, and by combining the past with a more contemporaneous narrative, paintings such as this have done much to reinvigorate figurative painting and return the human figure to its central position in the modern art historical canon.