Young Girl with Blue Dress

George Condo is an artist whose work is deeply engaged with the traditions of European and American painting; yet from his early days in the explosive East Village art scene in the 1980s he has developed a painterly style uniquely his own. From Mannerism to Cubism to Pop, Condo has been inspired by an astonishing scope of historical and visual references - traits that abound in the present lot, Young Girl with Blue Dress. Painted with virtuoso draftsmanship and infused with outlandish humour, Young Girl with Blue Dress is an extraordinary painting that evokes the complex and precarious states of the human psyche. By combining elements of the mundane, the absurd, even the grotesque, Condo playfully reveals his search for a profundity that is fraught with superficiality. As Massimiliano Gioni perfectly sums up: 'George Condo's world is peopled by mysterious creatures, fanciful characters and more-or-less failed actors - decrepit clowns and waiters, maitre d's and maidens, monsters and maenads. Everything looks broken and dysfunctional, but upon closer examination, follows a precise set of rules. The figures often appear in the centre of the canvas, and as if yearning to step into the limelight, they peer at us cautiously, waiting for a cue. Behind them, the background is as motionless as a stage curtain. Condo's painting is theatre: sometimes opera, sometimes vaudeville, more often a strange combination of Stanislavski method and commedia dell'arte. As in an Actors Studio on drugs, in Condo's paintings the characters break down and collapse, revealing their fears and desires. Life in Condo's work reveals itself to be both compromised and seductive, depraved and innocent, sophisticated and corrupt: it never dwindles down to a one-dimensional vision, but rather becomes an accumulation of opposing forces.' (M. Gioni, 'Physiognomic Fragments for the Promotion of Human Understanding and Montrous Love', in George Condo The Lost Civilization, exh. cat., Paris, Musée Maillol, 2009, p. 57).