The exhibition will be touring in 2017-18 to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art Humlebek. In 2011, the New Museum opened in New York a retrospective of Kondo’s mid-career entitled “Mental Conditions”, which takes place throughout the space of both London galleries and focuses exclusively on the work of George Condo, a key figure in contemporary American painting.
The exhibition brings together new drawings and paintings of moods captured in an abstract web, which reveal the humanity inherent in a fragmented psyche, and a series of emotions that both arise within us, hidden deep in our collective subconscious and revealed through a figurative form. His unique and creative visual language pays tribute to a wide range of historical and artistic traditions and genres, combining elements of Old Master portraiture with references to contemporary American culture.
Some of these parts of the paintings are similar – sparkling eyes, five-sided smiles – but there is something mesmerizing, unattainable in older works, a hint of technical sophistication that makes its horrors easier to suppress but no less terrible for it.
In his works he uses several historical styles and pictorial techniques, without excuses, with artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin and Willem de Kooning. George Condo combines artistic influences including Cubism and Abstract Expressionism. Kondo has taken a relentlessly creative path, and translates his ideas into works of astonishing originality.
He studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in Concord, New Hampshire, in early childhood and studied guitar playing and musical composition and all his life he was fond of painting and drawing. Lowell moved to Boston after two years of working at UMass and joined the proto-synth / punk band The Girls as bassist [1] with abstract artist Mark Dugley, avant-garde musician Dayved Heald and Robin A.
Kondo first met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979 when Basquiats opened Gray for Girls at a Tier 3 nightclub in the city center ; following this meeting Kondo moved to Ludlow Street in New York to pursue his career as an artist ; Kondo quickly entered the art world, dated Basquiat and collaborated with William Burroughs; and became friends with Allen Ginsberg and Keith Haring ; but Kondo only established his artistic identity after moving to Europe, first to Cologne and then
When he calls these characters pods – that’s the way he came to do the Invasion of the Body Snatchers alien duplicates – these were to be the last portraits of a strange menagerie of archetypal figures, including a banker, butler, an alcoholic and a strange French boy named Jean Louis who appeared in various incredible forms – including the image of the French maid – this apartment building that he assembled and worked for a quarter of
George Kondo drew an insane new group of work for an exhibition at Hauser’Wirth in London, although Kondo’s practice has long been intertwined with music, this intuitive way of working has become a significant deviation for the artist who typically treats his paintings more like drawings.
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Kondo had already known Basquiat as close friends by that time and Keith Haring met upon his return to New York. The two remained lifelong friends until Haring died of AIDS in 1990.
