George Condo

GEORGE CONDO (Concord, New Hampshire, 1957).
Untitled, 1983.
Oil on canvas.
Attached certificate issued by the Ricardo Ostalé Gallery (Zaragoza).
Presents exhibition label on the back of the Pat Hearn Gallery (New York).
Shows restorations in the lower area.
Provenance: Pat Hearn Gallery, Queensborough Community college Art Gallery and Ricardo Ostalé Gallery.
Measurements: 91 x 79 cm; 98 x 85 cm (frame).
This work by Condo is evidence of one of the most decisive and experimental moments in the artist's early career, when he was beginning to formulate the pictorial language that would eventually make him a fundamental figure in international contemporary painting. Executed in oil on canvas and historically linked to the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York, one of the most influential spaces in the alternative art circuit of the 1980s, the work reveals the emergence of a radically personal aesthetic, situated between figuration, expressive deformation and the fragmentary memory of art history. In the early 1980s, Condo was part of a generation of artists reacting to the predominance of minimalism and conceptualism of the previous decades. In a context marked by the international return to painting, Condo developed a singular proposal that avoided both pure abstraction and traditional figuration. His images seemed to emerge from an unstable mental territory, populated by hybrid forms, biomorphic structures and deformed characters that oscillate between the comical, the disturbing and the grotesque.
In this 1983 work, the composition is organized around a central figure constructed by an accumulation of organic and mechanical forms that seem to assemble and decompose simultaneously. The body does not appear anatomically defined, but suggested through fragments, nervous lines and gestural rhythms that evoke a mutant creature or living machinery. The dark green background acts as an ambiguous and undefined space where the figure seems to float, while the red accents generate visual vibrations that intensify the compositional tension and the sense of internal energy.
The painting already evidences some of Condo's fundamental influences: American abstract expressionism, the gestural freedom of Willem de Kooning, surrealist automatism and, especially, the ironic reinterpretation of the European tradition, from Picasso to Velázquez and Goya. However, even at this early stage, Condo does not seek direct scholarly quotation, but the creation of an "artificial psychology", a term that the artist himself would use years later to describe his characters and pictorial structures: beings constructed from fragmented emotions, contradictory impulses and overlapping cultural memories.
The 1980s was also a period of intense cultural transformation in New York. The city was experiencing the rise of the contemporary art market, the expansion of punk and post-punk culture, and the coexistence of painting, music and performance. Condo actively participated in this environment; he even worked with Andy Warhol and maintained links with the experimental music scene of the time. This context helps to understand the free, aggressive and profoundly urban character of his early works, where painting recovers a physical and visceral dimension.
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 major 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.