George Condo
Spatial Profiles, 2017
Oil on linen
44 x 48 inches (111.8 x 121.9 cm)
© George Condo / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photo: Farzad Owrang
Reworking outmoded pictorial techniques and styles in oil and varnish, [Condo] has fashioned a polyphonic terrain of cross-reference that ranges from the Renaissance to the Baroque, from Tex Avery cartoons to Cubism and Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Pop. Rather than being burdened by history, he seems liberated by it.
—Ralph Rugoff
George Condo emerged in the 1980s amidst a generation of downtown New York artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and David Salle, who approached painting with the vitality of a new expressionism. He exhumes centuries of art history, transforming it through an idiosyncratic visual language that is in equal measures comic and grotesque. Often combining motifs from different eras and contexts, he breaks down hierarchies and stylistic barriers to produce pictorially and psychologically complex works.
The surface of Spatial Profiles (2017) is activated by fluid, gestural brushstrokes that acknowledge the flatness of the picture plane. Reminiscent of American Abstract Expressionism of the 1940s, the canvas calls to mind the visual language of Arshile Gorky’s lyrical abstractions, Willem de Kooning’s all-over paintings, and Adolph Gottlieb’s Pictograph series. But instead of the commitment to abstraction, existential seriousness, and aspirations to universal significance sought by the New York School, Spatial Profiles is populated by wide-eyed, toothy figures that mine the graphic language of caricature, cartoons, and graffiti. Condo amalgamates features sourced from these disparate genres and traditions, filtering them through a deliberately ambivalent coding of facial expressions which form what he has called “composites of various psychological states painted in different ways,” thus conjuring features that only just coalesce into recognizable visages. Appropriating stylistic markers throughout history and combining them, he imbues his subjects with an unsettling familiarity, laying bare the precarious nature of memory and identity.