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拍品专文
George Condo’s Figure Composition 1-8 finds the artist at his most provocative, rendering eight tightly composed, sexually-charged scenes. The artist investigates the malevolent undercurrents in even seemingly-wholesome encounters. One partner’s face might appear twisted and ghoulish, despite being attached to a body in the midst of a tender embrace. Physical intimacy also proves a powerful compositional tool, with multiple bodies coalescing, in the cubist vein so prevalent in his work, into a single writhing form.
A committed postmodernist, Condo’s paintings are frequently scattered with art historical references and executed in a broad amalgam of styles. The present eight panels accomplish this individually, and epitomize the grouping as a collective. Within each panel, viewers might detect neoclassicism, Cubism, 18th century English portraiture, and French baroque, all at once. Underpinning everything, though, is Condo’s unrelenting humor and frequently sinister playfulness. Always soulful, even his most motley characters seek to connect with the viewer, as though to suggest an uncomfortable commonality. Blending and contrasting styles work in the service of Condo’s deeply humanist agenda, which aims to personalize the sometimes-detached field of postmodern painting.
The only panel to feature three figures finds a bow-tied, bunny eared woman (recalling the type of figuration in his iconic 2005 Batman and Bunny) squeezed into a low-cut top. Two more distorted women flank her, diminished behind her broad shoulders. In another, a man in a tuxedo (here referencing the titular subject in The Infernal Rage of Rodrigo, from 2008) stares out at the viewer, his parabolic scowl accounting for half of his pill-shaped face. In front of him lies a recumbent, topless woman, whose oversize hands and cubist face recall the blocky figures of 1930s Picasso. Elsewhere, a pinheaded woman turns her head to stare out at the viewer while she straddles a demonic man, whose twisted, evil face negates what might otherwise be a loving, if explicit, scene. Figure Composition 1-8 relies on subtly varied interactions, playing out over eight discrete scenes in service of an overall sense of unease, characterized by asymmetrical power dynamics both between characters in each scene, and between those characters and the viewer.
Still in another panel, a delicate, youthfully innocent beauty sits poised, with a squat, lecherous man resting his hand on her shoulder. Her transparent, wavy lingerie casts her, perhaps, as a courtesan as opposed to a spouse; her steadfast gaze suggesting that she has soldiered through this experience before. Elsewhere, a voluptuous woman with her hands behind her head and her elbows pointing upward is embraced around the waist by another woman, whose head burrows in her armpit. A common thread of predation runs through the eight panels, each of which features a character in what is best described as silent discomfort. Condo uses these paneled compositions as a means to explore various relationships and psychologies, reworking a common theme and adjusting its impact on the viewer each time. Specifically, Condo accomplishes this by reworking familiar themes, compositions and characters in order to delicately render scenes loaded with meaning derived both from his broad oeuvre and the history of art more broadly.
Condo’s insistent self-referencing affirms his role as one of the leading contemporary artists working today. Routinely casting and re-casting his previous efforts in new work highlights Condo as an artist fully aware of the scope and latitude of his decades-long practice–the most significant result of which is his massive universe of characters, players and imagined subjects. Condo fully exploits this fact, making many conscious references to his own work in ways that few artists feel comfortable doing. His own past works are as ripe for formal re-evaluations as an Old Masters or Picasso canvas. That notwithstanding, these self-references are often steeped in his many external influences, suggesting a broad feedback loop.
Rodrigo, that perennially raging, baldheaded man–who appears behind a reclined nude–recalls Goya’s subversively grotesque portraits of royalty. Dignified in dress yet unabashedly ghoulish, Condo’s Rodrigo extends the Spanish master’s premise to the extreme and pushes on the outer boundaries of portraiture. This straddling couple alludes to Rococo painting, when Western art approached the subject of sex with a newfound liberalness. This is a powerful premise that assumes a new openness in art and relies on a widespread understanding of art historical imagery and information as an artistic material, not a monolithic fact. Through a sure-handed approach to both painting and the various approaches thereto, Condo provides a compartmentalized view of his career, and the sultry and salacious characters that define it.
A committed postmodernist, Condo’s paintings are frequently scattered with art historical references and executed in a broad amalgam of styles. The present eight panels accomplish this individually, and epitomize the grouping as a collective. Within each panel, viewers might detect neoclassicism, Cubism, 18th century English portraiture, and French baroque, all at once. Underpinning everything, though, is Condo’s unrelenting humor and frequently sinister playfulness. Always soulful, even his most motley characters seek to connect with the viewer, as though to suggest an uncomfortable commonality. Blending and contrasting styles work in the service of Condo’s deeply humanist agenda, which aims to personalize the sometimes-detached field of postmodern painting.
The only panel to feature three figures finds a bow-tied, bunny eared woman (recalling the type of figuration in his iconic 2005 Batman and Bunny) squeezed into a low-cut top. Two more distorted women flank her, diminished behind her broad shoulders. In another, a man in a tuxedo (here referencing the titular subject in The Infernal Rage of Rodrigo, from 2008) stares out at the viewer, his parabolic scowl accounting for half of his pill-shaped face. In front of him lies a recumbent, topless woman, whose oversize hands and cubist face recall the blocky figures of 1930s Picasso. Elsewhere, a pinheaded woman turns her head to stare out at the viewer while she straddles a demonic man, whose twisted, evil face negates what might otherwise be a loving, if explicit, scene. Figure Composition 1-8 relies on subtly varied interactions, playing out over eight discrete scenes in service of an overall sense of unease, characterized by asymmetrical power dynamics both between characters in each scene, and between those characters and the viewer.
Still in another panel, a delicate, youthfully innocent beauty sits poised, with a squat, lecherous man resting his hand on her shoulder. Her transparent, wavy lingerie casts her, perhaps, as a courtesan as opposed to a spouse; her steadfast gaze suggesting that she has soldiered through this experience before. Elsewhere, a voluptuous woman with her hands behind her head and her elbows pointing upward is embraced around the waist by another woman, whose head burrows in her armpit. A common thread of predation runs through the eight panels, each of which features a character in what is best described as silent discomfort. Condo uses these paneled compositions as a means to explore various relationships and psychologies, reworking a common theme and adjusting its impact on the viewer each time. Specifically, Condo accomplishes this by reworking familiar themes, compositions and characters in order to delicately render scenes loaded with meaning derived both from his broad oeuvre and the history of art more broadly.
Condo’s insistent self-referencing affirms his role as one of the leading contemporary artists working today. Routinely casting and re-casting his previous efforts in new work highlights Condo as an artist fully aware of the scope and latitude of his decades-long practice–the most significant result of which is his massive universe of characters, players and imagined subjects. Condo fully exploits this fact, making many conscious references to his own work in ways that few artists feel comfortable doing. His own past works are as ripe for formal re-evaluations as an Old Masters or Picasso canvas. That notwithstanding, these self-references are often steeped in his many external influences, suggesting a broad feedback loop.
Rodrigo, that perennially raging, baldheaded man–who appears behind a reclined nude–recalls Goya’s subversively grotesque portraits of royalty. Dignified in dress yet unabashedly ghoulish, Condo’s Rodrigo extends the Spanish master’s premise to the extreme and pushes on the outer boundaries of portraiture. This straddling couple alludes to Rococo painting, when Western art approached the subject of sex with a newfound liberalness. This is a powerful premise that assumes a new openness in art and relies on a widespread understanding of art historical imagery and information as an artistic material, not a monolithic fact. Through a sure-handed approach to both painting and the various approaches thereto, Condo provides a compartmentalized view of his career, and the sultry and salacious characters that define it.