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Lot Essay
‘The characters in your paintings must be alive in order for the art to live a long life’ (George Condo)
Dating from one of George Condo’s richest and most exciting periods, The Banker’s Wife is a bold example of his theatrical portraits. Painted in 2011, the year of his landmark solo exhibition Mental States at the New Museum, New York, it has been held in the same private collection ever since. Populated by a motley cast of characters— from sailors and secretaries to businessmen, barbers and butlers—Condo’s portraits depict a society at once familiar and alien. Borrowing the stances, postures and lighting of the Old Masters, his subjects are cut and spliced into strange, disarming caricatures, their features distorted and multiplied. The Banker’s Wife is an arresting example of this approach, combining subtle chiaroscuro with an outlandish reorganisation of body parts and facial features. With nods to Picasso and the Surrealists as well as Rembrandt, Hals and others, it captures the extraordinary hybridised language that defines Condo’s oeuvre.
Condo came of age in 1980s New York, gigging alongside the young Jean-Michel Basquiat, sharing a studio with Keith Haring and working for Andy Warhol’s master printer. He spent ten years in Paris, where he grew close to the writer Allen Ginsberg and nurtured his love of Renaissance and Baroque music. Against the backdrop of these eclectic influences, he undertook intense studies of the artists he loved—from Tiepolo and Caravaggio to Cezanne and de Kooning—copying their works and deliberately tearing them apart in the process. Condo’s admiration for Picasso, in particular, would eventually give rise to an approach he termed ‘psychological Cubism’. It described his attempts to depict multiple emotional states simultaneously, just as Picasso had painted objects from different angles within a single image. Closely related was the notion of ‘artificial realism’: a term coined by Condo to capture his own clashing appropriation of styles, genres and languages. Both concepts became linchpins of a practice at pains to understand image-making from the inside out.
Condo’s portraits represent the sum total of his artistic and intellectual explorations during these years. They evolved from his so-called ‘antipodular’ creatures begun in 1996: strange beings with cartoon features and long flowing hair, based on the figures described in Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell who live ‘at the antipodes of everyday consciousness’. From there Condo began to develop a distinctive line-up of imaginary characters who came to inhabit his practice like actors in a play. Alongside recurring archetypes including ‘Rodrigo’ and ‘Jean-Louis’, he conjures figures drawn from all walks of life: servants, socialites, royalty, reprobates. His subjects are simultaneously courtly and clown-like, archaic and urban, comic and tragic. All are plagued by bouts of mania, ecstasy and anxiety, trapped in an existential crisis between conflicting mental and artistic states.
Works such as The Banker’s Wife, in this sense, are ultimately more than portraits. They are paintings about image-making, capturing the frictions, fictions and contradictions that are the very substance of art. ‘The point’, Condo explains, ‘is not to see how well somebody paints a figure, but something beyond that. A way of saying that the figure itself becomes a map of a number of intellectual processes involved in the idea of making an art work. 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’ (G. Condo, quoted in T. Kellein, ‘Interview with George Condo, New York, 15 April 2004’ in George Condo: One Hundred Women, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 2005, pp. 32-33). This conviction underscores the present work, whose subject exists in a permanent state of metamorphosis.
Dating from one of George Condo’s richest and most exciting periods, The Banker’s Wife is a bold example of his theatrical portraits. Painted in 2011, the year of his landmark solo exhibition Mental States at the New Museum, New York, it has been held in the same private collection ever since. Populated by a motley cast of characters— from sailors and secretaries to businessmen, barbers and butlers—Condo’s portraits depict a society at once familiar and alien. Borrowing the stances, postures and lighting of the Old Masters, his subjects are cut and spliced into strange, disarming caricatures, their features distorted and multiplied. The Banker’s Wife is an arresting example of this approach, combining subtle chiaroscuro with an outlandish reorganisation of body parts and facial features. With nods to Picasso and the Surrealists as well as Rembrandt, Hals and others, it captures the extraordinary hybridised language that defines Condo’s oeuvre.
Condo came of age in 1980s New York, gigging alongside the young Jean-Michel Basquiat, sharing a studio with Keith Haring and working for Andy Warhol’s master printer. He spent ten years in Paris, where he grew close to the writer Allen Ginsberg and nurtured his love of Renaissance and Baroque music. Against the backdrop of these eclectic influences, he undertook intense studies of the artists he loved—from Tiepolo and Caravaggio to Cezanne and de Kooning—copying their works and deliberately tearing them apart in the process. Condo’s admiration for Picasso, in particular, would eventually give rise to an approach he termed ‘psychological Cubism’. It described his attempts to depict multiple emotional states simultaneously, just as Picasso had painted objects from different angles within a single image. Closely related was the notion of ‘artificial realism’: a term coined by Condo to capture his own clashing appropriation of styles, genres and languages. Both concepts became linchpins of a practice at pains to understand image-making from the inside out.
Condo’s portraits represent the sum total of his artistic and intellectual explorations during these years. They evolved from his so-called ‘antipodular’ creatures begun in 1996: strange beings with cartoon features and long flowing hair, based on the figures described in Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell who live ‘at the antipodes of everyday consciousness’. From there Condo began to develop a distinctive line-up of imaginary characters who came to inhabit his practice like actors in a play. Alongside recurring archetypes including ‘Rodrigo’ and ‘Jean-Louis’, he conjures figures drawn from all walks of life: servants, socialites, royalty, reprobates. His subjects are simultaneously courtly and clown-like, archaic and urban, comic and tragic. All are plagued by bouts of mania, ecstasy and anxiety, trapped in an existential crisis between conflicting mental and artistic states.
Works such as The Banker’s Wife, in this sense, are ultimately more than portraits. They are paintings about image-making, capturing the frictions, fictions and contradictions that are the very substance of art. ‘The point’, Condo explains, ‘is not to see how well somebody paints a figure, but something beyond that. A way of saying that the figure itself becomes a map of a number of intellectual processes involved in the idea of making an art work. 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’ (G. Condo, quoted in T. Kellein, ‘Interview with George Condo, New York, 15 April 2004’ in George Condo: One Hundred Women, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 2005, pp. 32-33). This conviction underscores the present work, whose subject exists in a permanent state of metamorphosis.