GEORGE CONDO

Today 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.