GEORGE CONDO
b. 1957, United StatesToday Condo is considered to be one of the pioneers of the international revival of figurative painting. With a sensibility schooled in Pop Art, he single-handedly reintroduced the pictorial language of the Old Masters into the discussion concerning contemporary art. With great gusto and virtuosity, he applied the classic primers, glazes, and drawing techniques of art history to inferior, often absurd subjects. In a project of painterly investigation that was one of its kind, he turned his attention to the religious light of the Baroque and to the iridescent, transitional tones of the Florentine cangiante, to Rembrandt and Frans Hals, to Tiepolo, Caravaggio, and Rubens, to Raphael, Velázquez, Arcimboldo, and Fragonard. What imparts unity to his works is their dystopian, simultaneously empathetic view of people at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries, his sense for the absurdity of his existence, and his feeling of dehumanization.
Born in 1957 in New Hampshire, the artist had already at the age of nineteen filled two- to three-hundred sketchbooks, and had painted a large number of completed pictures. Before moving to Cologne, he lived for a short time in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles, abandoned a course of studies in art history, played in a Punk band, and worked in one of Andy Warhol’s printshops. He was a close friend not only of Basquiat and Haring, but also of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. In 1985 he moved to Paris where, among other things with the help of a certified copyist of the Louvre, he polished his painting techniques in imitation of the Old Masters. Ten years later, he returned to New York, where he still lives today.
George Condo (*1957, Concord, MA) lives and works in New York. At present, his first major public sculpture Constellation of Voices is on view at the outdoor terrace of The Metropolitan Opera, facing Lincoln Center Plaza, New York. Condo´s work was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions worldwide, the most recent being George Condo at Cycladic, Cycladic Art Museum, Athens and Expanded Portrait Compositions, Maritime Museum, Hong Kong, both in 2018. A retrospective of works on paper titled The Way I Think opened at the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C. in early 2017 and traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark. In 2016 Museum Berggruen, Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin presented the solo show George Condo. Confrontation curated by Udo Kittelman. In 2010 the major retrospective Mental States, a cooperation between New Museum, New York and Hayward Gallery, London, opened in the New Museum, New York (2010) and traveled to Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2011), Hayward Gallery, London (2011) and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2012). George Condo´s work was part of numerous group exhibitions worldwide, the most recent being the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia: May You Live in Interesting Times (2019), curated by Ralph Rugoff. Other group shows include the 13e Biennale de Lyon (2015), the 55th Venice Biennale (2013), Whitney Biennial (1987, 2010) as well as Picasso Mania at Grand Palais, Paris (2015), Looking Back for the Future, Kunsthalle Zurich (2012) and Blasted Allegories, Kunstmuseum Luzern (2008).
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