Lot Essay
A chimera positioned against a richly variegated ground, George Condo’s Girl with Green Hair (2009) exemplifies the artist’s distinctive pictorial universe, a world in which hybridity rules all and time is a farcical construct. With clear blue eyes and a penetrating stare, the protagonist of the present work confronts the viewer as her mouth curls into a slight grin. Drawing on portraiture conventions that span centuries, Condo has installed his figure on a large armchair; such a setting has long been used to exalt and frame a sitter. Yet although the girl is modestly attired, her Day-Glo hair and distorted, toothy mouth stand in stark contrast to historical propriety. Instead, the proportions and physiognomy depicted are outlandish, a counterpoint to the painting’s somewhat traditional title and muted staging. It is a vivid example of Condo's enigmatic canvases, which reconceive the formal language of painting as they push forward the medium’s many possibilities.
To achieve his sumptuous surfaces, Condo first lays down the painting’s ground before making a series of technical drawings. A work can involve several elements culled from different sources, all of which he sketches from memory. Rather than copying any specific, individual motif, Condo pulls atmospheres and details, all of which are commingled and remixed on the canvas. As Laura Hoptman has noted, Condo ‘imitates a master like Picasso in his manner of operation’ (L. Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’, in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 2011, p. 27). Neither a copy nor a send-up, Girl with Green Hair calls to mind Goya’s portraits, Modigliani’s almond-eyed sitters and Picasso’s many depictions of Dora Maar: material that has then been refracted through the lenses of Cubism, Postmodernism, and pop culture so as to upend any fixed association. Condo has described this approach as ‘Artificial Realism’, explaining that ‘what I am painting is the state in which the image-time of one reality superimposed in a field of another simultaneous presence now becomes a new conjunctive hyper-reality’ (G. Condo, quoted in R. Rugoff, ‘The Enigma of Jean Louis,’ in George Condo: Existential Portraits, exh. cat. Luhring Augustine, New York 2006, p. 8).
Girl with Green Hair was completed in the run-up to both the 2010 Whitney Biennale, in which Condo’s work was included, as well his 2011 exhibition co-organised by the Hayward Gallery, London, and the New Museum, New York. This was a moment in the artist’s practice during which his compositions took on, says Simon Baker, more ‘troubling variations’ on conventional genres (S. Baker, George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London 2015, p. 255). Not content to simply rifle through the same subjects that had long filled his mental compendium, Condo began to incorporate ever-more nuanced distortions into his canvases. In addition to the giants of the past, these works now cited Condo’s own earlier output; the present work, for example, recalls the artist’s ‘fake’ Old Master paintings that he worked on during the early 1980s. Time for Condo is never static, and Girl with Green Hair reveals an endless, infinite contingency. ‘When we thought for years that we should have a chronological order,’ says the artist, ‘we were only destroying ourselves’ (G. Condo, quoted in S. Baker, ibid.).
To achieve his sumptuous surfaces, Condo first lays down the painting’s ground before making a series of technical drawings. A work can involve several elements culled from different sources, all of which he sketches from memory. Rather than copying any specific, individual motif, Condo pulls atmospheres and details, all of which are commingled and remixed on the canvas. As Laura Hoptman has noted, Condo ‘imitates a master like Picasso in his manner of operation’ (L. Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’, in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. Hayward Gallery, London 2011, p. 27). Neither a copy nor a send-up, Girl with Green Hair calls to mind Goya’s portraits, Modigliani’s almond-eyed sitters and Picasso’s many depictions of Dora Maar: material that has then been refracted through the lenses of Cubism, Postmodernism, and pop culture so as to upend any fixed association. Condo has described this approach as ‘Artificial Realism’, explaining that ‘what I am painting is the state in which the image-time of one reality superimposed in a field of another simultaneous presence now becomes a new conjunctive hyper-reality’ (G. Condo, quoted in R. Rugoff, ‘The Enigma of Jean Louis,’ in George Condo: Existential Portraits, exh. cat. Luhring Augustine, New York 2006, p. 8).
Girl with Green Hair was completed in the run-up to both the 2010 Whitney Biennale, in which Condo’s work was included, as well his 2011 exhibition co-organised by the Hayward Gallery, London, and the New Museum, New York. This was a moment in the artist’s practice during which his compositions took on, says Simon Baker, more ‘troubling variations’ on conventional genres (S. Baker, George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London 2015, p. 255). Not content to simply rifle through the same subjects that had long filled his mental compendium, Condo began to incorporate ever-more nuanced distortions into his canvases. In addition to the giants of the past, these works now cited Condo’s own earlier output; the present work, for example, recalls the artist’s ‘fake’ Old Master paintings that he worked on during the early 1980s. Time for Condo is never static, and Girl with Green Hair reveals an endless, infinite contingency. ‘When we thought for years that we should have a chronological order,’ says the artist, ‘we were only destroying ourselves’ (G. Condo, quoted in S. Baker, ibid.).