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Lot Essay
“There was a time when I realized that the central focal point of portraiture did not have to be representational in any way. You don’t need to paint the body to show the truth about a character. All you need is the head and the hands.” (G. Condo, quoted in A. Bonney, “George Condo,” BOMB Magazine, Summer 1992)
George Condo’s art mischievously conflates the hallowed traditions of European painting and American contemporary culture in ways that can be at once alarming, whimsical and deeply psychological. For over three decades, the artist has dedicated himself to reworking bygone pictorial methods and styles, most notably those of the Renaissance, the Baroque, Cubism and Surrealism. Condo’s art is fearless and often audacious in its subject matter. His most frequently recurring characters are tragi-comic figures who emanate outrageous madness or monstrous aggression, sometimes all at once. Pieced together from the shards of art history, Condo’s portraits fuse the beautiful and the grotesque with an uncanny elegance, instigating a frisson of visual pleasure that only very few of his contemporaries can rival.
At once confrontational, luxurious and humorous, Nude on Sofa, 2006 is a classic example of Condo’s jocular versatility as a portrait artist. Immediately reminiscent of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 1538, the painting depicts a contorted and cartoonish nude woman splayed across an acid green couch, a lit cigarette dangling from her fingers, her forearm and hand inexplicably coated in bristly black fur. The woman’s piercing gaze confronts the viewer with menacing playfulness. Her snaggletooth grin, green clown’s nose and massive ears form a face that is almost more mouse-like than human. Perhaps the most intriguing and disorientating aspect of the painting is the white ovoid form at upper left that separates the figure’s head from her body. The effect is vaguely Cubist and also surreal, endowing the classic Renaissance composition with a chaotic dynamism.
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George Condo’s art mischievously conflates the hallowed traditions of European painting and American contemporary culture in ways that can be at once alarming, whimsical and deeply psychological. For over three decades, the artist has dedicated himself to reworking bygone pictorial methods and styles, most notably those of the Renaissance, the Baroque, Cubism and Surrealism. Condo’s art is fearless and often audacious in its subject matter. His most frequently recurring characters are tragi-comic figures who emanate outrageous madness or monstrous aggression, sometimes all at once. Pieced together from the shards of art history, Condo’s portraits fuse the beautiful and the grotesque with an uncanny elegance, instigating a frisson of visual pleasure that only very few of his contemporaries can rival.
At once confrontational, luxurious and humorous, Nude on Sofa, 2006 is a classic example of Condo’s jocular versatility as a portrait artist. Immediately reminiscent of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, 1538, the painting depicts a contorted and cartoonish nude woman splayed across an acid green couch, a lit cigarette dangling from her fingers, her forearm and hand inexplicably coated in bristly black fur. The woman’s piercing gaze confronts the viewer with menacing playfulness. Her snaggletooth grin, green clown’s nose and massive ears form a face that is almost more mouse-like than human. Perhaps the most intriguing and disorientating aspect of the painting is the white ovoid form at upper left that separates the figure’s head from her body. The effect is vaguely Cubist and also surreal, endowing the classic Renaissance composition with a chaotic dynamism.
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