“Any great artist is a sum total of the artists who came before him. Picasso’s 'Seated Bather' comes straight out of Renoir and there’s reference to David and 'Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe' by Manet. It’s an identity thing – everybody wants to feel like an individual, but we’re part of a continuum, whether we like it or not.”
—George Condo
In a period when the discipline of figurative painting was eclipsed by advances in conceptual art and abstraction, George Condo revitalised the medium through a careful and humorous appropriation of Old and Modern Masters fused with Pop culture references and reimagined in the artist’s highly distinctive visual style. Like his contemporaries Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Condo worked to combine stylistically representational and abstract elements, developing a mode of ‘Artificial Realism’ that was entirely his own. Swerving between Baroque theatricality, Cubist experiments in simultaneity and form, and Surrealist juxtaposition, Condo’s wildly inventive portraits are freed from the constraints of physical or anatomical likeness, populated by a host of strange figures characterised by exaggerated overbites, oversized ears, and bulging eyes - ‘Antipodal Beings’ from the far-flung edges of psychological experience.
“It's what I call artificial realism. That's what I do. I try to depict a character's train of thoughts simultaneously – hysteria, joy, sadness, desperation. If you could see these things at once that would be like what I'm trying to make you see in my art.”
—George Condo
Often taking on the menial roles of butler, maid, chauffeur, or janitor, this strange cast of characters allowed Condo to visually expose the tensions between the composed face a subject might have to present to the world, and the more complex internal feelings shifting beneath the surface, embodying ‘the despair, the heartache, the love and the happiness of any of us.' Such a strikingly original approach to notions of simultaneity also emphasises the supreme influence of the great modern master Pablo Picasso on Condo’s work over the years, a comparison made by Condo himself, who explained: ‘Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states. […] 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.’
Painted in 2005, Seated Bather takes these connections even further, drawing immediate compositional comparisons to Picasso’s pivotal series of nude bathers from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Although the motif of the nude bather had been a recurrent feature across Picasso’s oeuvre, his stylistic approach during this important period combined Cubist and more Surrealist elements with great dexterity and novelty. Applying a similar stylistic approach, Condo’s Seated Bather stands in a particularly close compositional relationship to Picasso’s Baigneuse Assise from 1930, now held in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In both paintings, a single, female figure sits in profile, alone against a sparse backdrop of sky, sea, and sand. In both, the angularity of the figure is exaggerated through the arrangement of the sitter’s limbs and the sharp contrast established between the bended knee and softer, more rounded forms. Just as Picasso fractured the body to reach a deeper understanding of its volumetric form, drawing himself into dialogue with both classical art and modern modes of experimentation, Condo’s similarly amalgamative approach has enabled the artist to pursue the complex and contradictory realities of our psychological lives, figures who ‘swing between abjection, pathos and absurdity, conjuring dehumanised subjects who nevertheless seem ‘acutely aware of their own predicament […] disenfranchised characters helplessly resisting their own alienation.’
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George Condo was born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire. Since his major international travelling mid-career survey Mental States in 2011, Condo has continued to exhibit widely, representing the United States at the 2013 and 2019 International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia.
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More recently, the artist was honoured with his largest show to date in Asia, held at the Long Museum, Shanghai in 2021.
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Now represented by Hauser & Wirth, his paintings are held in important international collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., amongst others.
