Abstract Conversation

“My memory is made up of fragments that I want put in a state of continuity.” - George Condo (G. Condo, quoted by L. Hoptman, “Abstraction as a State of Mind,” in R. Rugoff and L. Hoptman (eds.), George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat., Heyward Gallery, London, p. 2011, p. 24)

George Condo’s 2010 painting Abstract Conversation was painted during a prolific period for the artist, just months before his first major retrospective organized by New York’s New Museum in 2011. Acquired by the present owner the year it was painted, this multi-figure portrait is populated by a cast of mysterious characters; expertly rendered in acrylic paint, charcoal, and pastel, they populate a canvas at the confluence of contemporary figurative painting and art history. This particular crowd of figures characterizes the artist’s approach to portraiture, as by focusing only on what he considers to be the fundamental elements of the human body, he extracts a myriad of busy, introspective detail. “My memory is made up of fragments that I want put in a state of continuity” the artist has said. (G. Condo, quoted by L. Hoptman, “Abstraction as a State of Mind,” in R. Rugoff and L. Hoptman (eds.), George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat., Heyward Gallery, London, p. 2011, p. 24).

Corralled into the confines of Condo’s canvas is an array of distinctive and diverse characters. Some are fully realized portraits while others appear as snatched glimpses of faces in a crowd; some seem aware of the viewer’s presence, while others remain oblivious. Front and center is a curvaceous young woman holding an apple in the mode of Eve, her eyes downcast to avoid temptation. Next to her is placed one of Condo’s male protagonists, a balding man sporting a toothy grin and wearing a bow-tie—a common motif in many of Condo’s paintings. Beside them another couple appears more engaged with each other. They join a palimpsest of other overlapping figures—some well-defined, others suggested merely by rapid traces of the artist’s charcoal stick—the dynamic between all of them purposefully ambiguous.

With works such as Abstract Conversation, Condo enters into dialogue with a century of abstracted portraiture. Beginning with Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907, Museum of Modern Art, New York), artists have deconstructed the human figure only to rebuild them again, infused with new and interesting meanings. The are direct parallels between the present work and Picasso’s masterpiece—the positioning of the figures (particularly the figure on the left), and the preponderance of flesh-colored and blue tones.

As Laura Hoptman points out, throughout his career Condo has displayed an encyclopedic ability to channel the pantheon of modern art history. Throughout his work he incorporates the language of modernist abstraction developed by the likes of Matisse, Klee, Tanguy, Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock and Picasso. He is, as Hoptman says, “…a philologist—a collector, admirer and lover of languages—in this case, languages of representation”. He sees himself, she continues, in the tradition of the masters who revised the motifs and techniques that had gone before and paid homage to them, “Just as Manet would emulate—and send up—Titian, and Picasso would furiously tackle the subjects of Velázquez and Manet, Condo re-imagines Picasso’s portraits and de Kooning’s human-scapes as a challenge” (L. Hoptman, “Abstraction as a State of Mind,” in R. Rugoff and L. Hoptman (eds.), George Condo: Mental States, op. cit., pp. 25-27).

Born in New Hampshire in 1957, Condo moved to New York and spent the early 1980s working in Andy Warhol’s Factory in the silkscreen department. It was also during this time that he had the first exhibitions of his works that merged the styles of Old Masters with a fractured Pop sensibility. Expanding upon his interest in appropriating and finessing the extant imagery of art history, Condo began to work with some of the key elements of the New York School. “Expressionism and Surrealism had already converged in Abstract Expressionism, particularly Willem de Kooning’s, but Condo’s integration of them produces even more absurdly (and comically) monstrous and menacing figures than de Kooning’s women. The snarling white teeth of Condo’s human grotesques seem to allude to those de Kooning’s sometimes also possess, but Condo’s seem more biting, and there are more of them” (D. Kuspit, op. cit.). Consistently pulling from every direction but always staying true to his unique vision, Condo creates work that is both recognizable and bizarre at the same time.

Paintings such as Abstract Conversation have done much to reinvigorate the noble tradition of 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 rubrics. Condo uses his inimitable technique to reassess painting 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.