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).

Made in 1983, this work belongs to a decisive moment in George Condo's career, when the artist was beginning to develop the language that would make him one of the most influential figures in contemporary painting. Historically linked to the Pat Hearn Gallery in New York, a benchmark of the alternative art scene of the 1980s, the painting testifies to the emergence of a deeply personal aesthetic situated between figuration, abstraction and the memory of art history.

Seen from the perspective of his career, the work is particularly significant because it documents the moment when Condo began to formulate the principles that would define all his subsequent production: the fragmentation of identity, the coexistence between the comic and the disturbing, and the critical reinterpretation of the Western pictorial tradition. It is thus a remarkable example of the foundational years of an artist who would renew figurative painting and occupy a central place in the international art scene.

The composition is articulated around a central figure constructed by the accumulation of organic and mechanical forms that seem to assemble and disintegrate simultaneously. The body is presented as a fragmented and mutable entity, defined by gestural rhythms, nervous lines and chromatic tensions that generate an intense sense of energy. Against the dark green background, red accents reinforce the dynamic and ambiguous character of the image.

The work reveals some of the influences that marked Condo's training, from the gestural freedom of abstract expressionism and Willem de Kooning to surrealist automatism and the reinterpretation of the European tradition, especially Picasso. However, far from mere quotation, the artist transforms these references into complex psychological structures that anticipate the notion of "artificial psychology", a fundamental concept of his later production.

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.