George Condo

GEORGE CONDO (Concord, New Hampshire, 1957).
"Nighthead," 1991.
Oil on canvas.
Presents label of the Bischofberger Gallery (Zurich).
Signed, dated and titled on the back.
Measurements: 73 x 60 cm; 90 x 74,5 cm (frame).
In Nighthead George Condo fully deploys the pictorial language that defined his decisive contribution to the renewal of figurative painting in the late twentieth century. Executed in oil on canvas, the work presents a frontal bust that combines recognizable features of traditional portraiture with a deliberate psychological distortion, creating an ambiguous figure, halfway between the human and the imaginary. The face, with its fixed gaze, seems to fragment emotionally through chromatic and gestural hallmarks that evoke complex mental states, one of the fundamental axes of Condo's practice.
The painting is fully inscribed in the so-called Artificial Realism, a term coined by the artist himself to describe his method: a synthesis between the heritage of the great European masters, from Velázquez and Goya to Picasso, and contemporary American visual culture, marked by Pop Art, experimental music and the urban aesthetics of New York's East Village. In this work, the expressive treatment of the face, the direct brushstroke and the tension between beauty and deformation reflect Condo's desire to represent the artificial as if it were real, and the real as if it were a mental construction.
Executed at a moment of full creative maturity, Nighthead belongs to a key stage in the artist's career, coinciding with his international recognition and with the publication of Ghost of Chance (1991), a project carried out with William S. Burroughs. The presence of the label of the Bischofberger Gallery in Zurich, one of the most influential European spaces in the dissemination of Condo's work, reinforces the historical relevance and solid provenance of the piece.

George Condo is a central figure in the resurgence of figurative painting since the 1980s, in dialogue with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, with whom he shared the experimental climate of New York's East Village. After studying Art History and Music at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, Condo moved to New York in the late seventies, where he came into contact with the underground art scene and worked alongside Basquiat in the famous Great Jones Street building. In the early eighties he settled in Paris, a decisive experience in his training, which allowed him to deepen his direct study of the European pictorial tradition and consolidate his own language based on the critical appropriation and re-reading of classical genres. Throughout his career, Condo has developed a coherent and deeply intellectual oeuvre that reflects on human psychology, identity and the cultural construction of the image.His work is represented in important public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D. C., and The Broad in Los Angeles, as well as in numerous museums and institutional collections in Europe and the United States, confirming his position as one of the most influential painters of his generation.