George Condo
Saturday, 22 August 2009
The work of George Condo is grotesque, comic, baroque and sinister. His paintings, drawings and sculptures portray humanlike figures that make one think of caricatures and cartoon films. But these characters are brought to life on canvas in an expressive utterly painterly manner. Condo goes about his work in the traditional way, with preliminary studies and paying a great deal of attention to shades of colour, light and brush strokes. His portraits blend art history with elements of pop culture to arrive at a complex whole that he himself describes as ‘artificial realism’. They depict a contemporary, painterly vision of western society.
Condo’s work exudes a contemporary emotionality while striving towards a new conceptualisation of classical painting. Superficiality, self-representation and subcutaneous fear despair are evoked in a masterly fashion. Condo treats human psychology as a diverse complex topic, fixing upon the emotional ambivalence of human expression. Staging, representation and simulation is also embedded in one pictorial story narrative.
Text adapted from Xavier Hufkens.