George Condo

The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is organizing, in collaboration with the artist, the most significant exhibition to date of George Condo’s work. A painter, draftsman, and sculptor, George Condo has created a unique pictorial world, drawing inspiration from a profuse visual culture spanning Western art history, from the Old Masters to the present.

 

George Condo, The Portable Artist, 1995, Private collection © ADAGP

 

Born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire, George Condo moved to New York in 1979. He quickly became part of the local art scene, working notably for Andy Warhol’s silkscreen studio. Subsequently, he went to Cologne and then Paris, his primary place of residence from 1985 to 1995. His broad knowledge of European art led him to develop a personal approach to figurative painting and a fierce take on his times.

Following the museum’s two retrospectives devoted to Jean-Michel Basquiat in 2010 and Keith Haring in 2013, both artists with whom George Condo shared a true artistic friendship, this exhibition has been conceived as the last chapter of a New York trilogy, exploring the emergence of a new generation of painters in the 1980s. All of them, each in their own way, have contributed to reassessing the medium of painting, a direction which George Condo, the only one to have survived that decade, has been pursuing ever since.

Organized in dialogue with the artist, the exhibition aims to revisit over four decades of George Condo’s career by presenting his most emblematic works. Many works from major American and European museums (MoMA, the MET, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art) and private collections are brought together for the first time in Paris thanks to this project.

The exhibition features roughly 80 paintings, 110 drawings—grouped together in a space devoted to graphic arts—and some twenty sculptures interspersed throughout the exhibition.

Although the scope is retrospective, the exhibition does not follow a strictly chronological order. It unfolds through cycles and themes to which the artist has constantly returned in distinct series of works. The exhibition showcases the richness and diversity of George Condo’s practice in three main sections: its relationship to art history, his treatment of the human figure, and the connection to abstraction.

 

The exhibition

The exhibition begins with the fertile connections the artist has forged with the history of Western art. In a gallery riffing on the classic codes of a major Fine Arts museum, some of the artist’s boldest works are on display. They demonstrate how Condo has appropriated past masters, from Rembrandt to Picasso, and Goya to Rodin, incorporating them into his exuberant imagination, abounding with outrageous and disturbing figures.

The sequence continues with a group of works related to Artificial Realism, a concept Condo invented to describe works that defy any chronology. Created in a style and using techniques from the past, these works also borrow elements from graffiti culture (the series of Names Paintings, 1984) or cartoon imagery (Big Red, 1997), producing an effect of temporal ambiguity.

This section of the exhibition ends with a joint display of two bodies of work in which Condo takes an original approach to reformulating the history of art, either through accumulation (the series of Collages, from 1986), or contrast (the series of Combination Paintings, 1990-1993).

Next, a break in the presentation provides an opportunity to delve more deeply into the artist’s mind. A corridor showcases the fruitful relationship Condo has cultivated with literature, and especially his collaborations with Beat Generation writers (William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, etc.). This space leads to a graphic arts gallery, grouping together densely-hung works on paper ranging across Condo’s output, from his first childhood drawings to his most recent ink and pastel works.

The portrayal of the human figure is one of the main subjects in Condo’s work. The artist strives to depict the complexity of the human psyche through portraits of imaginary beings, described as “humanoid.” One section is devoted to them, first in a series of individual portraits from the early 2000s that revisit neoclassical codes, and then, a gallery of group portraits (the series of Drawing Paintings, 2009-2012). This section concludes with a gallery devoted to the series of Double Portraits (2014-2015). It deals with the duality of the human mind and the notion of “psychological cubism,” a term coined by the artist to describe his way of depicting several dissimilar emotions in one and the same portrait.

The final main section of the exhibition explores Condo’s relationship to abstraction. Since his beginnings, the artist has created works bordering on abstraction, such as the series Expanding Canvases (1985-1986), in which frenetic all-over scribbling blurs the composition. The section continues with a display of several monochrome series— whites (2001), blues (2021, and blacks (1990-2019). Special focus is given to the series of Black Paintings in an immersive room inviting introspection. The exhibition concludes with recent works from the series Diagonal (2023-2024), revealing the artist’s insatiable ability to redefine his own pictorial language.