George Condo at Cycladic

Condo, along with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Jeff Koons, was instrumental in reviving figuration in America in the 1980s and is considered one of the most important American figurative sculptors and painters to this day. He belongs to a generation of artists who had to work their way backwards into realism, seeing that at the time, in a post Abstract-Expressionist landscape, figuration had been put on hold while Conceptual Art and Minimalism were at the forefront of artistic practices. Balancing between the beautiful and the grotesque, the mundane and the absurd, high art and commercial ‘pop’ art, Condo’s fresh artistic creations make of him one of the most inventive artists of his generation.

The exhibition George Condo at Cycladic aimed to showcase the references, ideas, and mastered skills collected by the artist over time. Condo’s practice is rooted in the representation of the self or, as he puts it, one’s ‘many selves’, referencing the art, philosophy, and literature of the past. Playing with both time and iconography, Condo has looked to Greek Classical art, seventeenth-century Dutch old master painters, as well as Francisco Goya, Diego Velasquez, and Pablo Picasso among others.

In his very personal and singular iconic manner Condo ignites in our mind entire stories about each of his protagonists. The very physiognomy of his subjects is studied and exploited materializing into a new form of portraiture, which evidently combines elements of Cubism, Surrealism, notions of high and low art, abstraction versus figuration, and often the grotesque side of life; for the ultimate goal to portray the complexity of the human mental state of our times.

George Condo was born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1957. He attended the University of Massachusetts, in Lowell, where he studied Music Theory and Art History. His art can be viewed as a multilayered experience that brings the viewer in touch with a psychological exploration of human nature. Through the process of transformation involving art historical language and an actualization of philosophical content, Condo’s paintings create a visible window into the world we live in.

His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Judith Rothschild Foundation, Philadelphia; Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Ministère de la Culture, Paris; Fonds Regional d’Art Contemporain, Ile de France, Paris; Staedel Museum, Frankfurt; Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation, Athens; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; the Doron Sebbag Art Collection, ORS Ltd., Tel Aviv; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Mr. Condo has been invited to lecture at many prestigious institutions including Columbia University, Yale University, Pasadena Art Center, San Francisco MOMA, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Mr. Condo taught a six-month course at Harvard University entitled Painting Memory. In 1999 Mr. Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2005 he received the Francis J. Greenberger Award; in 2013 Condo was honored by the New York Studio School; in 2018 he was a BOMB Magazine 2018 Anniversary Gala Honoree.

Condo was recently the subject of a major retrospective of works on paper titled The Way I Think at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C, in early 2017, which travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in the Fall of 2017. In 2016 Condo’s work was the feature of amuseum-wide exhibition, Confrontation, at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Museum Berggruen, Berlin, curated by Udo Kittelmann. In 2011, the New Museum, New York presented the retrospective exhibition, Mental States. This exhibition travelled to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Hayward Gallery, London; and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt.

George Condo is represented by Skarstedt Gallery, New York and Sprüth Magers, Berlin.