“It’s not just the character in the paintings, it’s also going to be about the people who come to see the paintings and what it does to their mental state, to see all these different reflections of humanity, from all walks of life, happening at the same time on the wall.”
— George Condo

As delightful as it is repulsive, Green Seated Woman epitomises the bizarre amalgamations of physical anatomy and human psychology that is synonymous with George Condo’s oeuvre. Condo explores the limits and extremes of a fragmented psyche in his hilariously grotesque works that oscillate between the realms of the familiar and uncanny. Drawing inspiration from one of his biggest influences, Pablo Picasso: ‘Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states. Four of them can occur simultaneously. Like glimpsing a bus with one passenger howling over a joke they're hearing down the phone, someone else asleep, someone else crying – I'll put them all in one face.’ⁱ

Green Seated Woman is a prime example of the whimsical works from Condo’s extensive repertoire, incorporating all the signature features that is instantly recognisable and most representative of the artists’s unique visual vocabulary— clownish noses, protruding ears, ominous grins, fused features, and frenzied stares. Artfully employed, these quintessential characteristics are an act of defiance against traditional portraiture practices, and the present work particularly seems to challenge the age-old trope of the nude female subject. A chimeric combination of three hideous, swollen figures, the sitter of Green Seated Woman subverts common beauty standards, presenting the traditionally objectified female body in a shocking and even more disturbing manner.

Amidst a constellation of inspirational figures throughout canonical art history, Condo finds his greatest role model in Picasso, yet his pictorial rhetoric gleans more from the Cubist master than just thematic and conceptual ideas— as demonstrated in the present work, Condo pays tribute to Picasso’s painterly style. The torso of the portrait’s sitter is rendered in a geometric pattern, in sharp contrast to the smooth, rounded contours and edges observable in the rest of the painting. Such an intricate three-dimensional composition instantly recalls the defined, angular composition of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, one of Picasso’s most exemplary works and a representative masterpiece of the Cubist canon.

Left: Detail of the present work

Right: Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

“I believe that painting needs to transform in order for it to become interesting for each and every generation, but I think of it more in terms of being liberated by history. Liberated by what has come before.”
— George Condo

Through his reimagining of the classic trope of the female sitter, Condo both engages with, and departs from, a rich art historical canon: “…everything that I love or am interested in or am impressed by in art goes into my work. I can only distinguish myself by understanding that all of those things are in my paintings, and then my works still come out looking like something entirely new and different.” ⁱⁱ

One can detect in the present work a deep commitment to and a preoccupation with the human condition. Set against a nebulous, green-tinged background, the setting of Green Seated Woman is deliberately illusory and non-temporal. Particularly reminiscent of Picasso’s Bust of a Woman—a painting featuring Dora Maar seated on a metal chair, its vertical and horizontal stripes visually comparable to the striped deckchair in the present work—Condo, here, swaps Picasso’s model’s hat for the top figure’s bulbous head; and interchanges a jacket pocket for a third face in its tri-pillar of characters. Whether deliberate or not, the evocation of this work harks back to the complex emotions captured by Picasso during the end of World War Two, Bust of a Woman being an intimate glimpse into the anguish and horror during wartime Nazi occupation.

Left: Pablo Picasso, Buste de femme (Bust of a Woman), 1944. Collection of the Tate Modern, London (on long term loan, lent from a private collection, 2011)
Right: Detail of the present work

In its skewed composition, Green Seated Woman also brings to the fore a sense of isolation and longing. Sharing distinct similarities with portraits by the likes of Lucian Freud and Vincent Van Gogh, Condo’s rendition toys with the colour green, a hue evoking growth and renewal, being the colour of spring and rebirth; but also of jealousy and the power of the all-mighty Dollar. When coupled with the anachronistic beach deckchair, the painting becomes injected with surrealistic undertones, inviting varying interpretations. As Condo has remarked, “It’s really about reconstructive as opposed to deconstructive art: bringing the inter-relationships of languages in art together in a single canvas. My intention when I go into a work is to make people aware of all the great things I think there still are to draw from in painting.” ⁱⁱⁱ

Left: Lucian Freud, Red Haired Man on a Chair, 1963
Right: Vincent Van Gogh, Self Portrait (dedicated to Paul Gauguin), 1888. Collection of the Fogg Museum

Displaying a deep understanding of pre-existing pictorial languages and a playful irreverence for precedent, Condo simultaneously celebrates and undermines the genre of portraiture, internalising a multitude of sources to create a ludicrous yet awe-inspiring aesthetic that is distinctly his own. ‘In the beginning I took fragments of architecture to create a person, now I take a person and fragment them to make architecture’, says the artist [iv]. Indeed, as masterfully exhibited in the present work, Condo possesses the innate ability to delve into complex, conflicting states of mind, transforming his characters into surrogates of his exploration of human psychology.

George Condo: The Way I Think

Collector's Digest

After working as a diamond duster in Andy Warhol’s Factory for several months, a young Condo emerged onto the budding East Village art scene in the 1980s, soon finding himself a fixture in New York City’s artistic landscape alongside friends and fellow artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Working in a creative climate that was undergoing rapid reshaping by New Wave music and graffiti culture, Condo inaugurated the concepts of ‘artificial realism’ and ‘psychological cubism’, which were terms he coined to denote his hybridisation of contemporary techniques and art historical influences. Over the years, the artist has been honoured in various shows and retrospectives, many of which have been toured internationally.

In 2021, Condo’s largest Asian solo exhibition, George Condo: The Picture Gallery, was held at the Long Museum, Shanghai. Condo’s work was also included in the 58th Venice Biennale, May You Live In Interesting Times in 2019. The artist’s work has been extensively collected by prestigious institutions including The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art. the Tate Moder; Centre Georges Pompidou; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art; Museu d’Art Contemporani Barcelona; The Broad Collection, Los Angeles; and The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, amongst numerous others.

ⁱ George Condo, quoted in Stuart Jeffries, ‘George Condo: I was delirious. Nearly died.’, The Guardian, 10 February 2014, online.

ⁱⁱ George Condo, quoted in Emily Nathan, ‘artnet Asks: George Condo Sees Faces and Screaming Heads Everywhere’, artnet News, Emily Nathan, online.
ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.
^iv George Condo, quoted in Laura Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’, George Condo: Mental States, New York, New Museum, 2011, p.24.
- Provenance
  Simon Lee Gallery, London
  Private Collection
  Sotheby's, Hong Kong, 31 March 2018, lot 1081
  Acquired at the above sale by the present owner
- Artist Biography
  George Condo
  American
  Picasso once said, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal." Indeed, American artist George Condo frequently cites Picasso as an explicit source in his contemporary cubist compositions and joyous use of paint. Condo is known for neo-Modernist compositions staked in wit and the grotesque, which draw the eye into a highly imaginary world.
  Condo came up in the New York art world at a time when art favored brazen innuendo and shock. Student to Warhol, best friend to Basquiat and collaborator with William S. Burroughs, Condo tracked a different path. He was drawn to the endless inquiries posed by the aesthetics and formal considerations of Caravaggio, Rembrandt and the Old Masters.
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