George Condo
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George Condo | |
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Born | 1957 |
Education | University of Massachusetts Lowell |
Known for | Painting |
Spouse |
Anna Achdian
(m. 1989; div. 2015) |
Awards | Academy Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Francis J. Greenberger Award |
George Condo (born 1957) is an American visual artist who works in painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking. He lives and works in New York City.
Early life
Condo was born in
Work
When he emerged in the East Village art scene in the early 1980s, Condo coined the term Artificial Realism, "the realistic representation of that which is artificial", to describe his hybridization of traditional European Old Master painting with a sensibility informed by American pop.[2] Along with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Condo was instrumental in the international revival of painting from the 1980s onward.[3] His work has influenced many artists of his and the subsequent generation, including Nigel Cooke, Sean Landers, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Glenn Brown.[4]
The first public exhibitions of his work took place in New York City at various East Village galleries from 1981 to 1983. During this period he worked in
While still in Europe Condo met and began working with American art dealer
Between 1985 and 1995 Condo lived and worked mostly in hotels and rented studios between Paris and New York, while continuing to exhibit extensively in the United States and Europe. In New York, Condo and Joseph Glasco maintained studios at I Bond Street and became good friends. Condo, Glasco and Julian Schnabel were preparing for exhibitions with Leslie Waddington’s gallery in London during that time.[7] After Condo moved to Paris, Glasco stayed in his apartment in Île de la Cité one summer in the late 1980s.[8] In Paris, Haring introduced Condo to the American writer and artist Brion Gysin, who in turn later introduced him to William S. Burroughs. Condo and Burroughs collaborated on numerous paintings and sculptures between 1988 and 1996. Selected works from their collaborations were exhibited in 1997 at Pat Hearn Gallery, New York.[9] Condo and Burroughs also worked together on a collection of writings and etchings titled Ghost of Chance, which was published by the Whitney Museum in 1991.
While in Paris, Condo also met and befriended philosopher and semiotician Félix Guattari, best known for his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, when Condo was working in a studio in the apartment building where Guattari resided. Guattari wrote extensively on Condo's work, including an introductory text and interview in the exhibition catalogue for Condo's 1990 solo exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon. Of Condo's paintings Guattari wrote:
"There is then a very specific 'Condo effect' which separates you from all the painters you seem to reinterpret. You sacrifice everything to this effect, particularly pictorial structure, which you systematically destroy, thus removing a protective guardrail, a frame of reference which might reassure the viewer, who is denied access to a stable set of meanings." (Felix Guattari, 1990)
Throughout his career as an artist, Condo's work has served as an influence and inspiration to contemporary writers including Burroughs, Guattari, Demosthenes Davvetas, Donald Kuspit, Wilfried Dickhoff, and Salman Rushdie, whose 2001 novel Fury includes a chapter inspired by Condo's 1994 oil painting The Psychoanalytic Puppeteer Losing His Mind.[10] American fiction writer David Means also used a Condo painting, The Fallen Butler (2010), as inspiration for his short story "The Butler's Lament", which appears in the catalogue for the exhibition Mental States, a mid-career survey of the artist's paintings and sculptures organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and the New Museum, New York, in 2011. Allen Ginsberg, a close friend and frequent visitor to Condo's Paris studio, where he photographed the artist on several occasions, asked Condo to paint his portrait for the cover of his Selected Poems: 1947-1995, published in 1996 by HarperCollins.[11]
Condo's paintings, like The Orgy (2004), Superman (2005), Batman and Bunny (2005), Maja Desnuda (2005), Dreams and Nightmares of the Queen (2006), and God (2007), place archetypal human figures in a world of humorous, grotesque painting style that the artist refers to as Psychological Cubism.[12]
Commissions
In addition to commissions for book covers, such as
Exhibitions
In 2005 the Museum der Moderne Salzburg and Kunsthalle Bielefeld co-organized the exhibition George Condo: One Hundred Women, curated by Dr. Thomas Kellein. The exhibition was accompanied by a monograph featuring essays by Margrit Brehm, Stacey Schmidt, and Kellein. In 2009 the Musee Maillol, Paris, organized the exhibition George Condo: The Lost Civilization featuring paintings, drawings, and sculpture created between 2003 and 2008. The monograph published by Gallimard in conjunction with the exhibition featured new writings on the artist's work by Didier Ottinger, Bertrand Lorquin, and Massimiliano Gioni, as well as a reprinting of Felix Guattari's original text from 1990.
In 2011, the New Museum in New York City opened a mid-career retrospective of Condo's work titled Mental States. This watershed exhibition was critically acclaimed by Holland Cotter of The New York Times as "sensational". The show traveled to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Hayward Gallery, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.
In 2013, Condo's large black-and-white banner featuring a
in Berlin honored Condo with the exhibition George Condo. Confrontation.In 2017, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., presented George Condo: The Way I Think, 1962 - 2017. The exhibition is a major survey of Condo's drawings and "drawing paintings" that will travel to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark, in the fall of 2017.
Collections
Condo's work is in the permanent collections of several New York museums, namely the
Recognition
In 2000, Condo was the subject of the documentary film Condo Painting, directed by John McNaughton.[21] The film, which follows the progress of Condo's large-scale oil painting Big Red over the course of one year, features an appearance by Allen Ginsberg, as well as footage of Condo collaborating with William S. Burroughs on paintings the two made together at Burroughs' Kansas home in the mid-1990s.
There has been extensive critical writing about Condo's work. Several monographs have been published, including The Imaginary Portraits of George Condo (powerHouse), George Condo: Sculpture by Thomas Kellein (Hatje Kanz), George Condo: One Hundred Women (Hatje Kanz), and in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, George Condo: Mental States (Hayward Publishing).
In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2005 he received the Francis J. Greenburger Award. He 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 New Museum, New York. In 2004, Condo taught a six-month course at Harvard University entitled Painting Memory.
Art market
Condo has been showing with Sprüth Magers since 1984, Simon Lee since 1998, Skarstedt since 2005, and Xavier Hufkens since 2006.[22] In January 2020, Condo signed on exclusively with Hauser and Wirth and Sprüth Magers.[23][24]
His painting Force Field (2010) set his auction record of $6.85 million at Christie's Hong Kong in July 2020.[25]
Personal life
Condo married actress Anna Achdian in 1989. They have two daughters, Eleonore and Raphaelle.[26] They divorced in 2016.[citation needed]
References
- New York Times.
- ^ "Frieze Magazine | Archive | Time's Fool". Frieze.com. Archived from the original on October 5, 2012. Retrieved January 31, 2012.
- ^ Lindemann, Adam. "Outwit, Outpaint, Outlast: George Condo and the Back-Burnered 1980s Art Stars | The New York Observer". Observer.com. Archived from the original on February 13, 2011. Retrieved January 31, 2012.
- ^ Cotter, Holland (January 27, 2011). "'George Condo: Mental States,' at New Museum - Review". The New York Times.
- ^ Amadour (February 15, 2023). "15 Minutes with George Condo". Los Angeles Magazine.
- ^ Keith Haring Journals, Introduction Robert Farris Thompson, Penguin (Non-Classics), 1997
- ISBN 9781611688542.
- ^ Marti Mayo interview with Joseph Glasco and George Condo, Galveston, 1993-1994
- ^ "William S. Burroughs (USA)".
- ^ Fury (novel)
- ^ "The Allen Ginsberg Project".
- ISBN 978-3-8365-1490-3.
- ^ Book of Sketches
- ^ The Story of the Ghost
- ^ "Kanye West beautiful dark twisted fantasy banned 10 albums covers".
- ^ [1] Kanye Gives Kim Kardashian a George Condo-Painted Hermès Birkin Bag
- ^ "Artist George Condo Explains His Five Covers for Kanye West's Twisted Fantasy - Slideshow". November 21, 2010.
- ^ [2] Adam Kimmel x George Condo T-Shirt for Barneys New York
- ^ Minsker, Evan (September 21, 2020). "Travis Scott Releasing New Song With M.I.A. and Young Thug This Week". Pitchfork. Retrieved September 24, 2020.
- ^ Carol Vogel (January 25, 2013), "George Condo, On View In and Outside the Metropolitan Opera House", The New York Times.
- ^ Chang, Chris (2000). "Condo Painting". Frieze Magazine (52). Archived from the original on August 6, 2011. Retrieved January 31, 2012.
- ^ Sources: George Condo, Whose Paintings Sell for Up to $6 M. at Auction, In Talks to Join Hauser & Wirth Gallery ARTnews, December 12, 2019.
- ^ "George Condo, Painter of Picasso-Inspired Tableaux, is Now Represented by Hauser & Wirth". January 15, 2020.
- ^ "George Condo Now Represented by Mega Art Dealer, Hauser & Wirth". January 15, 2020.
- ^ "George Condo - Force Field, 2010". Christie's.
- ^ Tomkins, Calvin (January 9, 2011). "Portraits of Imaginary People". The New Yorker.
External links
- George Condo on Artcyclopedia
- "GEORGE CONDO Mental States", The Brooklyn Rail review
- Timeout interview
- George Condo x Adam Kimmel T-shirt for Barneys New York
- Selection of George Condo works at SVLSTG
- The Way I Think. An interview with George Condo Video by Louisiana Channel