.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
George Condo’s 2007 Standing Nude is an important example of the artist’s decades-long preoccupation with – and formal exploration of – the human figure. The painter revels in the subject’s inflated proportions, highlighting her Venus-like silhouette and casting her as a totemic, almost cosmic, feminine force. As one of the predominant painters of his generation, Condo draws on centuries of tradition in figurative art, from Greek bronzes to Picasso’s blocky neoclassical nudes of the late 1910s. By establishing a dialogue with past art historical moments, Condo both references and rewrites those histories in the service of what he terms artificial realism. This term, which encompasses the vast majority of Condo’s output, thrives on internal contradiction, as its name might suggest.
Indeed, Standing Nude is an excellent, if subtle, example of artificial realism. It is an imagined and impossible portrait of a non-existent subject, realized through a collapsing of art historical strains and traditions. Eschewing the bold, contrasting colors and grotesque figures of some of his busier paintings, Condo explores a more contemplative and contained side of his practice. Tender and sinuous, the subject’s twisting body invites the viewer into the painting’s otherwise flattened grey-black space. Her lightly tanned skin alternately glows and darkens as it protrudes and recedes in space, making the picture feel like a self-contained studio, complete with its own unseen light sources.
Reminiscent of the French Return to Order following World War One, Condo’s Standing Nude approaches its many forbears with reverence and a powerful hunger to revisit and re-litigate the past. Unlike those French painters, Picasso and Matisse chief among them, Condo does not look over his shoulder as a way to affirm national pride or lineage. His allegiance, for the purpose of his work, is to art itself. Here, Condo draws on Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish Baroque painter famed for his voluptuous women, Eduard Manet, the French Impressionist whose Olympia caused a stir for its intemperate sensuality and Michelangelo, whose broad, writhing figures constitute an enduring pillar for nearly all subsequent figure painting. Condo’s formal egalitarianism and wide-reaching base of influences enables his painting to simultaneously resemble the aforementioned painters and remain remarkably fresh and unmistakably new. “Condo’s artificial realisms not only stretch from the beginning of his working life to his most recent practice, but they will continue into the future, whether Condo is around or not. His serial interventions in the way painting (and the languages of paintings) from previous chapters of art history operate will never allow the dust to resettle as it was. Condo will always be the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour; the allegorical figure that the poet and painter William Blake imagined, angel and devil in equal parts, generating clouds of complexity with every move he makes, purely by refusing to stop working” (S. Baker & G. Condo (eds.), George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 104).
Indeed, Standing Nude is an excellent, if subtle, example of artificial realism. It is an imagined and impossible portrait of a non-existent subject, realized through a collapsing of art historical strains and traditions. Eschewing the bold, contrasting colors and grotesque figures of some of his busier paintings, Condo explores a more contemplative and contained side of his practice. Tender and sinuous, the subject’s twisting body invites the viewer into the painting’s otherwise flattened grey-black space. Her lightly tanned skin alternately glows and darkens as it protrudes and recedes in space, making the picture feel like a self-contained studio, complete with its own unseen light sources.
Reminiscent of the French Return to Order following World War One, Condo’s Standing Nude approaches its many forbears with reverence and a powerful hunger to revisit and re-litigate the past. Unlike those French painters, Picasso and Matisse chief among them, Condo does not look over his shoulder as a way to affirm national pride or lineage. His allegiance, for the purpose of his work, is to art itself. Here, Condo draws on Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish Baroque painter famed for his voluptuous women, Eduard Manet, the French Impressionist whose Olympia caused a stir for its intemperate sensuality and Michelangelo, whose broad, writhing figures constitute an enduring pillar for nearly all subsequent figure painting. Condo’s formal egalitarianism and wide-reaching base of influences enables his painting to simultaneously resemble the aforementioned painters and remain remarkably fresh and unmistakably new. “Condo’s artificial realisms not only stretch from the beginning of his working life to his most recent practice, but they will continue into the future, whether Condo is around or not. His serial interventions in the way painting (and the languages of paintings) from previous chapters of art history operate will never allow the dust to resettle as it was. Condo will always be the man sweeping the interpreter’s parlour; the allegorical figure that the poet and painter William Blake imagined, angel and devil in equal parts, generating clouds of complexity with every move he makes, purely by refusing to stop working” (S. Baker & G. Condo (eds.), George Condo: Painting Reconfigured, London, 2015, p. 104).