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George Condo | |
|---|---|
 Portrait of the artist by Sophie Caby in 2012 | |
| Born | 1957 (1957) |
| Education | University of Massachusetts Lowell |
| Known for | Painting |
| Spouse | |
| Awards | Academy Award of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters, Francis J. Greenberger Award |
George Condo (born 1957) is anAmericanvisual artist who works inpainting,drawing,sculpture andprintmaking. He lives and works inNew York City.
Condo was born inConcord, New Hampshire. He studiedart history andmusic theory at theUniversity of Massachusetts Lowell. Throughout his early life he studiedguitar andmusic composition while pursuing his lifelong interest in painting and drawing. After two years at UMass Lowell, he moved toBoston, where he worked in asilk screen shop and joined the proto-synth/punk band The Girls as abassist,[1] withabstract painter Mark Dagley,avant-garde musicianDaved Hild, andRobin Amos, founding member ofCul de Sac.[2] Their only single, "Jeffrey I Hear You"/"Elephant Man" (1979) was produced byDavid Thomas ofPere Ubu. Condo metJean-Michel Basquiat in 1979 when Basquiat's band Gray opened for the Girls at the downtown nightclubTier 3. After this meeting Condo moved toLudlow Street in New York City to pursue his career as an artist. He became a founding member of the punk/blues band Hi Sheriffs of Blue in 1980.
When he emerged in theEast Village art scene in the early 1980s, Condo coined the term Artificial Realism, "the realistic representation of that which is artificial", to describe his hybridization of traditional EuropeanOld Master painting with a sensibility informed by American pop.[3] Along withJean-Michel Basquiat andKeith Haring, Condo was instrumental in the international revival of painting from the 1980s onward.[4] His work has influenced many artists of his and the subsequent generation, including Nigel Cooke,Sean Landers,John Currin,Lisa Yuskavage andGlenn Brown.[5]
The first public exhibitions of his work took place in New York City at variousEast Village galleries from 1981 to 1983. During this period he worked inAndy Warhol's factory, primarily in the silkscreen production studio applying diamond dust to Warhol'sMyths series. He moved briefly toLos Angeles and had his first solo exhibition there in 1983 at Ulrike Kantor Gallery. In Los Angeles, he would visit theWhisky a Go Go with Basquiat.[6] After returning to New York later that year he made his first trip toEurope. Condo moved toCologne, Germany, where he met and worked with several artists from the Mulheimer Freiheit group, including Walter Dahn andJiri Georg Dokoupil. His first solo exhibition in Europe was in 1984 atMonika Sprüth Gallery.
While still in Europe Condo met and began working with Americanart dealerBarbara Gladstone, and in 1984 had a simultaneous two-gallery exhibition in New York at Pat Hearn and Barbara Gladstone Galleries. Already close friends with Basquiat by this time, Condo metKeith Haring on returning to New York, and the two remained lifelong friends until Haring's death fromAIDS in 1990.[7] Several of Condo's most significant works from this period, such asDancing to Miles (1985), which was included in the 1987Whitney Biennial and is now in the collection of the Broad Foundation in Los Angeles, were painted in Haring's East Village studio.
Between 1985 and 1995 Condo lived and worked mostly inhotels and rented studios betweenParis and New York, while continuing to exhibit extensively in the United States and Europe. In New York, Condo andJoseph Glasco maintained studios at I Bond Street and became good friends. Condo, Glasco andJulian Schnabel were preparing for exhibitions withLeslie Waddington's gallery in London during that time.[8] After Condo moved to Paris, Glasco stayed in his apartment inÎle de la Cité one summer in the late 1980s.[9] In Paris, Haring introduced Condo to the American writer and artistBrion Gysin, who in turn later introduced him toWilliam S. Burroughs. Condo and Burroughs collaborated on numerous paintings and sculptures between 1988 and 1996. Selected works from their collaborations were exhibited in 1997 at Pat Hearn Gallery, New York.[10] Condo and Burroughs also worked together on a collection of writings andetchings titledGhost of Chance, which was published by theWhitney Museum in 1991.
While in Paris, Condo also met and befriended philosopher and semioticianFélix Guattari, best known for his collaborations withGilles Deleuze, when Condo was working in a studio in the apartment building where Guattari resided. Guattari wrote extensively on Condo's work, including an introductory text and interview in the exhibition catalogue for Condo's 1990 solo exhibition at GalerieDaniel Templon. Of Condo's paintings Guattari wrote:
"There is then a very specific 'Condo effect' which separates you from all the painters you seem to reinterpret. You sacrifice everything to this effect, particularly pictorial structure, which you systematically destroy, thus removing a protective guardrail, a frame of reference which might reassure the viewer, who is denied access to a stable set of meanings." (Felix Guattari, 1990)
Throughout his career as an artist, Condo's work has served as an influence and inspiration to contemporary writers including Burroughs, Guattari, Demosthenes Davvetas,Donald Kuspit, Wilfried Dickhoff, andSalman Rushdie, whose 2001 novelFury includes a chapter inspired by Condo's 1994 oil paintingThe Psychoanalytic Puppeteer Losing His Mind.[11] American fiction writerDavid Means also used a Condo painting,The Fallen Butler (2010), as inspiration for his short story "The Butler's Lament", which appears in the catalogue for the exhibitionMental States, a mid-career survey of the artist's paintings and sculptures organized by theHayward Gallery, London, and theNew Museum, New York, in 2011.Allen Ginsberg, a close friend and frequent visitor to Condo's Paris studio, where he photographed the artist on several occasions, asked Condo to paint his portrait for the cover of hisSelected Poems: 1947-1995, published in 1996 byHarperCollins.[12]
Condo's paintings, likeThe Orgy (2004),Superman (2005),Batman and Bunny (2005),Maja Desnuda (2005),Dreams and Nightmares of the Queen (2006), andGod (2007), place archetypal human figures in a world of humorous, grotesque painting style that the artist refers to as Psychological Cubism.[13]
In addition to commissions for book covers, such asJack Kerouac'sBook of Sketches (Penguin Poets, 2006),[14] for which he also wrote the introduction, Condo has also created or designed album covers for numerous musicians.[15] Most notably, in 2010 Condo collaborated with rapperKanye West and created a series of paintings for West's albumMy Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and various singles.[16] Kanye West used to use a Condo painting as hisTwitter image, and Condo has painted aHermèsBirkin Bag for West that West gave toKim Kardashian.[17] Condo also produced four alternate copies of the album cover that, although not included on the actual cover of the record, came included with certain productions of the record on vinyl and as individual posters. All variations reflect themes found throughout the West album, and were all considered for the cover. The final design, depicting a demonic caricature of the artist with a femalephoenix on his lap and bottle in his hand, was even censored byiTunes, and the album cover is now a blurred version of the Condo painting.[18] Condo subsequently distanced himself from Kanye West in an interview.[19] That same year, Condo released a t-shirt with Adam Kimmel forBarneys New York.[20] Condo's work has also been featured on the covers of thePhish albumThe Story of the Ghost (Elektra, 1998),Danny Elfman'sSerenada Schizophrana (2006), andFranck Debussy Schumann by Dora Schwarzberg andMartha Argerich (AventiClassic, 2006), among others. Most recently, Condo painted an abstracted portrait of the opera countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo for the cover of his first album ARC, released in 2018 by DeccaGold and featuring recordings of works by Philip Glass and George Frideric Handel. In 2020, Condo collaborated with rapperTravis Scott and created the artwork for Scott's single "Franchise".[21]
In 2005 theMuseum der Moderne Salzburg andKunsthalle Bielefeld co-organized the exhibitionGeorge Condo: One Hundred Women, curated by Dr. Thomas Kellein. The exhibition was accompanied by a monograph featuring essays by Margrit Brehm, Stacey Schmidt, and Kellein. In 2009 the Musee Maillol, Paris, organized the exhibitionGeorge Condo: The Lost Civilization featuring paintings, drawings, and sculpture created between 2003 and 2008. The monograph published by Gallimard in conjunction with the exhibition featured new writings on the artist's work by Didier Ottinger, Bertrand Lorquin, and Massimiliano Gioni, as well as a reprinting of Felix Guattari's original text from 1990.
In 2011, theNew Museum in New York City opened a mid-career retrospective of Condo's work titledMental States. This watershed exhibition was critically acclaimed byHolland Cotter ofThe New York Times as "sensational".[22] The show traveled toMuseum Boijmans Van Beuningen inRotterdam, theHayward Gallery, and theSchirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.
In 2013, Condo's large black-and-white banner featuring acourt jester was installed on the façade of theMetropolitan Opera House, advertising the Met's new production ofVerdi'sRigoletto.[23] In 2016 theBerggruen Museum in Berlin honored Condo with the exhibitionGeorge Condo. Confrontation.
In 2017, thePhillips Collection inWashington, D.C. presentedGeorge Condo: The Way I Think, 1962 - 2017.[24] The exhibition is a major survey of Condo's drawings and "drawing paintings" that traveled to theLouisiana Museum of Modern Art inHumlebæk, Denmark in autumn 2017.
In 2023 Condo was the subject of an exhibition,Entrance to the Mind: Drawings by George Condo in the Morgan Library & Museum,[25] at the Morgan Library & Museum.
Condo's work is in the permanent collections of several New York museums, namely theMuseum of Modern Art, theWhitney Museum, theMetropolitan Museum of Art, theAlbright-Knox Museum, theCorcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and theBroad Foundation, Los Angeles, among other American and European museums and public collections.
In 2000, Condo was the subject of the documentary filmCondo Painting, directed byJohn McNaughton.[26] The film, which follows the progress of Condo's large-scale oil paintingBig Red over the course of one year, features an appearance byAllen Ginsberg, as well as footage of Condo collaborating withWilliam S. Burroughs on paintings the two made together at Burroughs'Kansas home in the mid-1990s.
There has been extensive critical writing about Condo's work. Several monographs have been published, includingThe Imaginary Portraits of George Condo (powerHouse),George Condo: Sculpture byThomas Kellein (Hatje Kanz),George Condo: One Hundred Women (Hatje Kanz), and in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title,George Condo: Mental States (Hayward Publishing).
In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2005 he received theFrancis J. Greenburger Award. He has been invited to lecture at many prestigious institutions includingColumbia University,Yale University, Pasadena Art Center,San Francisco MOMA, theSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and theNew Museum, New York. In 2004, Condo taught a six-month course atHarvard University entitledPainting Memory. In 2008, he won the International Artist Award fromAnderson Ranch Arts Center inColorado.
Condo has been showing withSprüth Magers since 1984, Simon Lee since 1998,Skarstedt since 2005, andXavier Hufkens since 2006.[27] In January 2020, Condo signed on exclusively with Hauser and Wirth and Sprüth Magers.[28][29]
His paintingForce Field (2010) set his auction record of $6.85 million atChristie's Hong Kong in July 2020.[30]
Condo married actress Anna Achdian in 1989. They have two daughters, Eleonore and Raphaelle.[31] They divorced in 2016.[citation needed]
Ahead of the2024 United States presidential election, Condo was one of 165 leading contemporary artists who contributed pieces toArtists for Kamala, an online sale with all proceeds raised going directly to theKamala Harris campaign.[32]
