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Lot Essay
George Condo’s Combined Faces is a tapestry-like painting, incorporating some of the artist’s most renowned visual motifs on a single, large-scale canvas. Nude sketches evoking neoclassical figures mingle with fully modeled cubist faces, alongside animal-human hybrids and abstract patterning. In this work, Condo, a painter known for his abandonment of artistic convention, provides viewers with a snapshot of his broad, decades-long practice. A leading figure in postmodern painting since the 1980s, the artist’s cocktail of styles and influences runs the gamut of art history, ranging from the renaissance to the present day. Juxtaposing disparate styles with one another is a classic postmodern technique, but typically relies on appropriation, as opposed to a repurposing of the artist’s own work. Indeed, the technique is alluring to Condo, an artist for whom personal style is, like paint or clay, a malleable artistic medium to be prodded and stretched to its logical extreme.
Pablo Picasso, Condo’s most important spiritual forbear, used the technique in his 1920 Studies, which saw the Spaniard combine neoclassical studies for a romantic beach scene, which itself appears as a study in the painting, and several varieties of cubist still lifes. He and Condo share this retrospective, career-conscious attitude which prompts serious reflection on past work and styles in a continuous bid for artistic improvement. Condo’s Combined Faces finds the artist taking an overhead view of his work in the ‘90s, which saw his star rise and his work collected by major museums. With this in mind, the painting becomes a sort of self-contained retrospective of Condo’s mid-career moment, enlivened by his myriad stylistic zigs and zags which continue to the present day, over twenty years later.
In essence, Combined Faces is a macro view of Condo’s practice; its title is a pun on some of his portraits and group compositions in which he quite literally combines several faces into one. Here, though, he combines a variety of small works, most of them abstracted faces, into one cohesive picture. Indeed, the painting also serves as a sort of road map for understanding the artist’s wider approach to painting and determining his own self-appointed role in the process. Condo sees himself as a sort of interpreter and arbiter, both of his influences’ work and his own. He often cannibalizes previous ideas in the service of his latest painting, and frequently reuses the memorable characters that populate his delightfully demented painterly universe.
Combined Faces is an important and revelatory document of one of Condo’s most celebrated moments. Like a constellation, it contains a multitude of fully wrought ideas—artistic worlds unto themselves—in an assembly of Condo’s own devising. The painter offers an encyclopedic view into his working mind, and challenges viewers to make sense of it. Condo’s artistic opacity breaks like a wave on this highly legible and logical assemblage of his own process. A masterpiece of postmodern painting, Combined Faces is at once an ironic self-assessment, a collection of potent ideas and an example of Condo’s legendary double-edged penchant for chaos and clarity.
Pablo Picasso, Condo’s most important spiritual forbear, used the technique in his 1920 Studies, which saw the Spaniard combine neoclassical studies for a romantic beach scene, which itself appears as a study in the painting, and several varieties of cubist still lifes. He and Condo share this retrospective, career-conscious attitude which prompts serious reflection on past work and styles in a continuous bid for artistic improvement. Condo’s Combined Faces finds the artist taking an overhead view of his work in the ‘90s, which saw his star rise and his work collected by major museums. With this in mind, the painting becomes a sort of self-contained retrospective of Condo’s mid-career moment, enlivened by his myriad stylistic zigs and zags which continue to the present day, over twenty years later.
In essence, Combined Faces is a macro view of Condo’s practice; its title is a pun on some of his portraits and group compositions in which he quite literally combines several faces into one. Here, though, he combines a variety of small works, most of them abstracted faces, into one cohesive picture. Indeed, the painting also serves as a sort of road map for understanding the artist’s wider approach to painting and determining his own self-appointed role in the process. Condo sees himself as a sort of interpreter and arbiter, both of his influences’ work and his own. He often cannibalizes previous ideas in the service of his latest painting, and frequently reuses the memorable characters that populate his delightfully demented painterly universe.
Combined Faces is an important and revelatory document of one of Condo’s most celebrated moments. Like a constellation, it contains a multitude of fully wrought ideas—artistic worlds unto themselves—in an assembly of Condo’s own devising. The painter offers an encyclopedic view into his working mind, and challenges viewers to make sense of it. Condo’s artistic opacity breaks like a wave on this highly legible and logical assemblage of his own process. A masterpiece of postmodern painting, Combined Faces is at once an ironic self-assessment, a collection of potent ideas and an example of Condo’s legendary double-edged penchant for chaos and clarity.