Lot Essay
Spindly, other-worldly figures emerge from and intertwine with one another in George Condo’s Untitled (1987), as foreground conflates with background and dizzying line carries the eye through unbeknownst relationships. Prefiguring the artist’s iconic crowded canvases and distorted faces, this charcoal work on paper unites his admiration for Surrealism and inventive understanding of contemporary perspective: “the monochromatic works…are truly automatic drawings — interlocking traceries engendered by the subconscious” (Recent Drawings: George Condo, Mike Kelley, Ellen Phelan, Janis Provisor, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, April-July 1988, n.p.). Employed by the Surrealist circles in early 20th-century Paris, automatic drawing found the artist dragging a writing instrument across the sheet with no particular direction in an effort to reveal the truth buried deep beneath layers of rationality. Though the resulting pictures surpass logic, they make eerie sense to the mind’s eye – perhaps because they originated there. Condo expands the practice to a grand scale, heightening not only the viewer’s visual experience of the unconscious, but also the standards of quality to which exercises like these were often held. In doing so, he elevates that thinking over which the artist has no control, asserting the power of the subconscious to create and interpret images against the mechanical pursuit of rote technique.