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拍品专文
"Representational pictures are the artist's body, abstractions are pictures of the artist's mind." – G. Condo
“In the beginning I took fragments of architecture to create a person... now I take a person and fragment them to make architecture.” – G. Condo
Straddling the line between comedy and despair, the grotesque and the beautiful, George Condo's rich pictorial creations have made him one of the most inventive artists of his generation. Celebrated as a bridge between the figurative tradition by Picasso in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the abstract figural creations of masters like Gorky, de Kooning and beyond into the contemporary canon, Condo has made his own distinct and important mark upon the lineage of abstracted portraiture. George Condo’s Female Composition presents the traditional odalisque is a distinctly contemporary manner. Re-writing the traditional rules of portraiture, the artist presents his figures shrouded in a field of soft gray, the faces of the reclining nude figures shifting as they are rendered with washes of opaque blue and white and bold lines etched into the canvas in bold black. In a style he has dubbed "Psychological Cubism," Condo deviates from Picasso and Braque's practice of instantaneously depicting different facets of an object and in turn sets to paint the internal, ever changing, and often conflicting emotions of the human face. The enigmatic, unstable animation of Condo’s work pushes the boundaries of such containment, but is restrained from total abandon: whether the faces contort with pain or pleasure in response is left unclear. “Picasso,” he says, “takes what’s neat and pretty and clean and he turns it into what it really is, like an ugly monster” (G. Condo, quoted in Emily Nathan, “artnet Asks: George Condo Sees Faces and Screaming Heads Everywhere,” artnet news, 14 October 2015). The topography of each face leaves behind all physical appearance in favor of mapping out the furthest extremes of the human psyche. With this subtle palette, even in the places where lines blur, the bodies still keep their form and shape. In this way, his figures remain bold and confrontational, even in this intimate grouping. Set against this shifting field, the contorted bodies are deeply emotive, engaging with their audience.
Drawing on historical art traditions and techniques, in this work Condo has worked to develop a contemporary edge to Cubist visual motifs. The artist deploys a particular devotion to the act of painting, pulling practices from diverse sources like Picasso, Velázquez, Matisse, and Twombly, as well as studying the techniques of Old Masters, to present "an artificial simulated American view of what European painting looked like" (G. Condo, quoted in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2011, p. 12). Condo’s work is engaging because it presents scenes which we feel are familiar, yet painted in a way that is startlingly contemporary. Calvin Tompkins remarks that Condo has “used the language of his predecessors, their methods and techniques, and applied them to subjects they would never have painted” (C. Tompkins, “Portraits of Imaginary People”, New Yorker, 2011). Within present Female Composition, the form of each figure yields to its partner on the left and right, overlapping and standing so close that they almost merge into an orgy of voluptuous form. These strokes perform two roles–defining the figure’s presence and at the same time firmly anchoring them in the background from which they emerge. Self-consciously disarming the viewer's expectations, Condo's images of nudity, sex, rage, insanity, glee, violence, loneliness and alienation become wrought with a complex mixture of emotion and interpretation. Fusing heroic modes of abstraction and debased forms of figuration, Condo's work observes that the transcendent aspirations of high culture are inevitably tangled up with our more clownish natures and desires.
“In the beginning I took fragments of architecture to create a person... now I take a person and fragment them to make architecture.” – G. Condo
Straddling the line between comedy and despair, the grotesque and the beautiful, George Condo's rich pictorial creations have made him one of the most inventive artists of his generation. Celebrated as a bridge between the figurative tradition by Picasso in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon and the abstract figural creations of masters like Gorky, de Kooning and beyond into the contemporary canon, Condo has made his own distinct and important mark upon the lineage of abstracted portraiture. George Condo’s Female Composition presents the traditional odalisque is a distinctly contemporary manner. Re-writing the traditional rules of portraiture, the artist presents his figures shrouded in a field of soft gray, the faces of the reclining nude figures shifting as they are rendered with washes of opaque blue and white and bold lines etched into the canvas in bold black. In a style he has dubbed "Psychological Cubism," Condo deviates from Picasso and Braque's practice of instantaneously depicting different facets of an object and in turn sets to paint the internal, ever changing, and often conflicting emotions of the human face. The enigmatic, unstable animation of Condo’s work pushes the boundaries of such containment, but is restrained from total abandon: whether the faces contort with pain or pleasure in response is left unclear. “Picasso,” he says, “takes what’s neat and pretty and clean and he turns it into what it really is, like an ugly monster” (G. Condo, quoted in Emily Nathan, “artnet Asks: George Condo Sees Faces and Screaming Heads Everywhere,” artnet news, 14 October 2015). The topography of each face leaves behind all physical appearance in favor of mapping out the furthest extremes of the human psyche. With this subtle palette, even in the places where lines blur, the bodies still keep their form and shape. In this way, his figures remain bold and confrontational, even in this intimate grouping. Set against this shifting field, the contorted bodies are deeply emotive, engaging with their audience.
Drawing on historical art traditions and techniques, in this work Condo has worked to develop a contemporary edge to Cubist visual motifs. The artist deploys a particular devotion to the act of painting, pulling practices from diverse sources like Picasso, Velázquez, Matisse, and Twombly, as well as studying the techniques of Old Masters, to present "an artificial simulated American view of what European painting looked like" (G. Condo, quoted in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat., New Museum, New York, 2011, p. 12). Condo’s work is engaging because it presents scenes which we feel are familiar, yet painted in a way that is startlingly contemporary. Calvin Tompkins remarks that Condo has “used the language of his predecessors, their methods and techniques, and applied them to subjects they would never have painted” (C. Tompkins, “Portraits of Imaginary People”, New Yorker, 2011). Within present Female Composition, the form of each figure yields to its partner on the left and right, overlapping and standing so close that they almost merge into an orgy of voluptuous form. These strokes perform two roles–defining the figure’s presence and at the same time firmly anchoring them in the background from which they emerge. Self-consciously disarming the viewer's expectations, Condo's images of nudity, sex, rage, insanity, glee, violence, loneliness and alienation become wrought with a complex mixture of emotion and interpretation. Fusing heroic modes of abstraction and debased forms of figuration, Condo's work observes that the transcendent aspirations of high culture are inevitably tangled up with our more clownish natures and desires.