Visions of the Dying Bird Species

Vision of the Dying Bird Species is a testament to George Condo’s masterful imaginings of vivid and enigmatic worlds. Executed in 1990, the painting shortly follows the artist’s return to New York after a highly formative decade in Europe. Blending pictorial idioms foraged from Old Master paintings, American Pop Art, Expressionism, Cubism and Surrealism, it was during this period that Condo cultivated his career-defining ‘Artificial Realism’. In a graphic, fanciful style typical of his works from the 1980s and 1990s, the present work depicts a distinctly dreamlike scene. In a fantastical and comedic array of oil painted forms, a plump green tree is juxtaposed with six severed branches that sprawl across the canvas. On a collaged paper cut-out, two pastel blue eyes—an enduring and signature motif of the artist—stare out to meet the viewers’ gaze with exaggerated, cartoonish amazement. Overseen by a vigilant black bird, the canvas becomes a site of visual play, evoking an innuendo on the act of looking itself. Indeed on closer inspection, one eye shapeshifts into a fish, its curled eyelashes transforming into green fins and its tear duct opening into a mouth. Paying homage to the uncanny, psychoanalytic language of Surrealism in his assemblage of archetypal, metamorphic forms, Condo conjures the workings of the unconscious, and his own unique, free-associative relationship with art history.