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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1957", "fc": "George Condo", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/george-condo-10148" } ]

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[]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "actions: expressive", "actions: postures and motions", "adults", "arm / arms raised", "body", "caricature", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "female", "formal qualities", "gesticulating", "gestural", "head / face", "nudes", "people", "physiognomy", "psychology", "social comment", "society", "woman, old" ]

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[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "body", "breast", "chaos", "cubist space", "education, science and learning", "emotions and human qualities", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "formal qualities", "fragmentation", "from recognisable sources", "head / face", "humour", "people", "physiognomy", "psychology", "society", "subconscious", "universal concepts" ]

[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1957", "fc": "George Condo", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/george-condo-10148" } ]

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[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "actions: expressive", "actions: postures and motions", "adults", "balancing", "bottle", "cartoon / comic strip", "diseases and conditions", "drinking", "drunkenness", "eating and drinking", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "formal qualities", "from recognisable sources", "glass", "humour", "kitchen", "laughing", "leg / legs raised", "leisure and pastimes", "lying down", "man", "objects", "people", "physiognomy", "psychology", "society", "universal concepts", "vessels and containers" ]

[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1957", "fc": "George Condo", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/george-condo-10148" } ]

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[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "actions: expressive", "actions: postures and motions", "adults", "balancing", "bottle", "cartoon / comic strip", "diseases and conditions", "drinking", "drunkenness", "eating and drinking", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "formal qualities", "from recognisable sources", "glass", "humour", "inscriptions", "kitchen", "laughing", "leg / legs raised", "leisure and pastimes", "lying down", "man", "notes and diagrams", "objects", "people", "physiognomy", "psychology", "society", "symbols and personifications", "universal concepts", "vessels and containers" ]

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[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "actions: postures and motions", "adults", "architecture", "body", "cartoon / comic strip", "clothing and personal items", "domestic", "door", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "features", "female", "figure", "formal qualities", "from recognisable sources", "head / face", "humour", "inscriptions", "interior - non-specific", "interiors", "male", "man", "nudes", "objects", "people", "physiognomy", "printed text", "psychology", "sex", "sex and relationships", "sitting", "society", "stocking", "symbols and personifications", "universal concepts", "woman" ]

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[]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "actions: postures and motions", "actions: processes and functions", "attack", "cartoon / comic strip", "crime and punishment", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "formal qualities", "humour", "landscape", "natural phenomena", "objects", "people", "physiognomy", "psychology", "rocky", "society", "spear", "standing", "stone", "throwing", "universal concepts", "weapons" ]

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[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "adults", "body", "caricature", "cartoon / comic strip", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "food and drink", "formal qualities", "head / face", "humour", "individuals: male", "man", "‘Maurizio’", "named individuals", "objects", "people", "physiognomy", "portraits", "psychology", "social comment", "society", "universal concepts", "vegetable, carrot" ]

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[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "adults", "body", "caricature", "cartoon / comic strip", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "food and drink", "formal qualities", "head / face", "humour", "individuals: male", "man", "‘Maurizio’", "named individuals", "objects", "people", "physiognomy", "portraits", "psychology", "social comment", "society", "universal concepts", "vegetable, carrot" ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "actions: expressive", "body", "cartoon / comic strip", "characters", "education, science and learning", "emotions and human qualities", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "formal qualities", "fragmentation", "from recognisable sources", "gestural", "grimacing", "group", "groups", "head / face", "humour", "lifestyle and culture", "literature and fiction", "menace", "Mickey Mouse", "mouth", "people", "physiognomy", "popular culture", "portraits", "portraits - non-specific", "psychology", "smiling", "society", "subconscious", "transformation", "universal concepts" ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "actions: expressive", "actions: postures and motions", "adults", "body", "book - non-specific", "caricature", "cartoon / comic strip", "education, science and learning", "emotions and human qualities", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "formal qualities", "from recognisable sources", "grimacing", "head / face", "humour", "leisure and pastimes", "love", "named individuals", "objects", "people", "physiognomy", "Picasso, Pablo", "psychology", "reading", "reading, writing, printed matter", "recreational activities", "sitting", "smiling", "social comment", "society", "universal concepts", "woman" ]

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[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "actions: postures and motions", "adults", "‘Anna’", "arms folded", "chiaroscuro", "clothing and personal items", "dress", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "formal qualities", "individuals: female", "named individuals", "natural phenomena", "objects", "people", "physiognomy", "portraits", "psychology", "shadow", "society", "woman" ]

[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1957", "fc": "George Condo", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/george-condo-10148" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "adults", "architecture", "building - non-specific", "cartoon / comic strip", "chiaroscuro", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "formal qualities", "hill", "landscape", "people", "sky", "storm", "townscapes / man-made features", "weather" ]

[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1957", "fc": "George Condo", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/george-condo-10148" } ]

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[]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

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[]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "animal / human", "animals: fantastic", "body", "cartoon / comic strip", "characters", "clothing and personal items", "collar", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "formal qualities", "from recognisable sources", "head / face", "humour", "literature and fiction", "Mickey Mouse", "objects", "people", "physiognomy", "psychology", "society", "universal concepts" ]

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[]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "actions: expressive", "adults", "body", "butcher", "cartoon / comic strip", "defacement", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "figure", "formal qualities", "from recognisable sources", "gestural", "head / face", "humour", "people", "physiognomy", "psychology", "smiling", "society", "trading and commercial", "universal concepts", "work and occupations" ]

[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1957", "fc": "George Condo", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/george-condo-10148" } ]

[ { "id": 999999779, "shortTitle": "Tate Collection" }, { "id": 999999782, "shortTitle": "Works with images" }, { "id": 999999961, "shortTitle": "General Collection" }, { "id": 999999956, "shortTitle": "Collection" } ]

[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "actions: expressive", "actions: postures and motions", "arm / arms raised", "body", "breast", "caricature", "cartoon / comic strip", "education, science and learning", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "formal qualities", "grimacing", "head / face", "humour", "people", "physiognomy", "pornography", "psychology", "social comment", "society", "universal concepts" ]

[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1957", "fc": "George Condo", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/george-condo-10148" } ]

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[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div><div></div><p><span>This is one of a large group of drawings in Tate’s collection by the American artist George Condo, produced between 1976 and 2009. They are executed in a variety of media – including graphite, pen, ink, pastel, charcoal, coloured pencil, watercolour and acrylic paint on paper – and vary in scale from small to large. Some of the drawings are monochromatic while others include colour, introduced as bursts and washes to add depth and intensity. Although the drawings depict a wide range of subjects in varying styles and were produced at different points across a thirty-year period, they are conceived as a thematic grouping by the artist and can be displayed as an installation on one wall as well as separately.</span></p><p><b> </b></p><p><span>A prolific draftsman, Condo has produced and continues to produce vast quantities of drawings. Many are conceived as studies for paintings, serving as a forum through which to explore recurring characters, identities and themes, while others stand simply as studies or experimentations: exercises in technique or procedure. Whereas some of the drawings in Tate’s collection – such as </span><i>Reading by Candlelight </i><span>1994 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-reading-by-candlelight-t14696\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14696</span></a>) or </span><i>Study for Metamorphosis </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-metamorphosis-t14705\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14705</span></a>) – are sketched onto pages torn from notebooks with rough, hurried marks, others are built up with colour and texture. </span><i>Dispersed Figures and Lines</i><span> 1996 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-dispersed-figures-and-lines-t14722\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14722</span></a>) and </span><i>Colored Dream Objects</i><span> 1995 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-colored-dream-objects-t14726\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14726</span></a>) are largely abstract, composed of distorted shapes and lines that meet to form pockets of brightly coloured paint. Others are figurative, depicting human and animal characters that meet in strange and unsettling scenarios.</span></p><p><span>Condo studied at Lowell University in Massachusetts between 1976 and 1978 at the request of his father, who acted as a professor of physics and calculus in the university’s mathematics department. Despite not wanting to submit to the formal structure of college art education, it nonetheless provided the opportunity to begin an in-depth investigation of classical art history. The artist has said: ‘I took basic art history, but the most instructive class I had was on Baroque and Rococo painting. I did coloured pencil copies of Caravaggios – really cheesy proto-Pop Bic pen copies.’ (Quoted in Enright 2003, p.24.) Following his move to New York’s East Village in the early 1980s, Condo continued to reinvent the past in new ways, nicknaming his first adult painting, </span><i>The Madonna </i><span>1982, ‘a fake Tiepolo’ in reverence to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (Hayward Gallery 2011, p.11). A move to Paris in 1985, where he lived intermittently for a decade, offered a new wealth of learning opportunities.</span></p><p><span>With a rich and consummate knowledge of European and American art history and popular culture, Condo’s drawings incorporate a strange and wonderful itinerary of visual influences. Motifs drawn from surrealism, abstract expressionism and pop sit happily alongside the cubism of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), while the spirit of Renaissance and Baroque masters Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) and Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) is re-appropriated alongside cartoons from Loony Tunes to Walt Disney. A deeply hybrid practice, Condo’s work is as connected to a European past as it is to the American present. Ralph Rugoff, curator of Condo’s retrospective at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011 has described him as ‘liberated’ by history, rather than ‘burdened’ by it (ibid).</span></p><p><span>Filled with a cast of curious and grotesque characters – many of whom harbour a life of their own in the artist’s painted world – Condo’s work provokes a mixed emotional response from the viewer. His theatrical visions offer up profoundly peculiar tragi-comic beings who simultaneously elicit both pity and revulsion, pushing the boundaries of the understood and the acceptable. While Condo’s work is often conflicted, however, it almost always contains an element of comedy. Humour – at times subtle, at others crude and glaring – is used as a conceptual tool, destabilising the gravitas of art history and imbuing old tropes with new meaning. The artist has said: ‘My objective is to portray the strangeness I feel, and the strangeness I see is the strangeness around me’ (Enright 2003, p.24).</span></p><p><span>Some of the drawings in Tate’s collection incorporate recognisable characters from popular culture, re-envisaged with new meaning in comic situations. </span><i>Batman and Playboy Bunny</i><span> 2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-batman-and-playboy-bunny-t14692\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14692</span></a>) presents a tongue-in-cheek morning-after scenario, coupling together two giants of the magazine industry. The comic book superhero stands in full costume under a hotel sign with a dishevelled bunny at his side: an amusing post-liaison shaming perhaps, or a shyly concealed secret love affair. The same sign also appears in another work from the same year, </span><i>Study for the Housekeeper’s Day Off </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-the-housekeepers-day-off-t14693\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14693</span></a>), in which a manic-faced employee sits slumped against a wall, drowning the horrors of the week, the establishment or a dalliance of her own, perhaps, with an already upturned bottle.</span></p><p><span>Others in the group feature characters invented by the artist himself who have since come to exist as family members in his complex painterly society. Uncle Joe, the subject of a major painting from 2005 with leg outstretched and cigarettes and bottle to hand, is pictured here in various states of imagining in two preliminary sketches, </span><i>Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-uncle-joe-t14701\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14701</span></a>) and </span><i>Schematic Study for Uncle Joe </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-schematic-study-for-uncle-joe-t14702\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14702</span></a>), both from 2005; the latter filled with scribbled comments that reveal the artist’s precise plans for colour and composition. The ‘Antipodal Beings’ that came to prominence in his work shortly before the turn of the millennium are also visible here in </span><i>Antipodal Being </i><span>(Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-antipodal-being-t14715\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14715</span></a>) and </span><i>Outer Antipodes</i><span> (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-outer-antipodes-t14718\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14718</span></a>), both from 1996, demonstrating the continuity of his ideology and themes across a range of media.</span></p><p><span>In </span><i>Study for Portrait of Dakis and Maurizio </i><span>2006 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-for-portrait-of-dakis-and-maurizio-t14706\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14706</span></a>) we are presented with an individual prised from the realms of real life: the Italian-born, New York-based artist Maurizio Cattelan (born 1960). Having contributed to Cattelan’s programme for </span><i>The Wrong Gallery</i><span> – a tiny exhibition space temporarily relocated from Manhattan to Tate Modern, London, which was conceived, directed and launched by Cattelan in 2005 – Condo presents his friend in comic fashion, with a troubling squint and a carrot extending through his head from ear to ear. Visible inside his mouth is a cantankerous-looking Dakis Joannou, a Greek collector and great supporter of Cattelan’s work, who appears to be causing the artist much discomfort from his strange internal position. </span><i>Curtain Design for the Ballet of Monte Carlo </i><span>2000 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-curtain-design-for-the-ballet-of-monte-carlo-t14714\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14714</span></a>), which depicts a number of dancers in brightly coloured costumes adopting theatrical poses, is similarly grounded in Condo’s real-life experience, relating to a group of works produced in conjunction with his role as scenographer for </span><i>Opus 40 </i><span>with the Monte Carlo Ballet.</span></p><p><span>Condo is known for his portraits of women with strange, contorted faces. </span><i>Family </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-family-t14720\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14720</span></a>) reveals the variation in Condo’s treatment of the female figure: at times tender and maternal, at others fierce and consuming. </span><i>Alone on a Hill </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-alone-on-a-hill-t14732\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14732</span></a>) and </span><i>The Young Executive </i><span>2003 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-young-executive-t14733\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14733</span></a>) equally show the diverse ways in which the male form is portrayed: one a peculiar individual with a monstrous expression lost in his thoughts; the other a portrait of naïve stupidity. </span><i>Casino Sketch </i><span>2005 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-casino-sketch-t14703\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14703</span></a>), jotted onto a piece of paper taken from Mohegan Sun – the second largest casino in the United States – reveals the artist’s characteristic sexual intrigue. Through a rather unsettling voyeuristic act, we are reminded of the many potential vices of the gambling world.</span></p><p><span>As much as the drawings make use of humour, they also exude seriousness and sincerity, indicating both the deep respect that Condo holds for his artistic sources and the way in which his refined visual literacy enables him to reveal unsettling and deeply profound aspects of our own internal characters. The figure in </span><i>Study of Older Woman </i><span>2004 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-study-of-older-woman-t14699\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14699</span></a>), for example, executed in a ‘fake’ Renaissance style, ishaunting with its emotive gesture and hollowed-out eyes, while </span><i>Faustian Moment </i><span>2007 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-faustian-moment-t14721\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14721</span></a>) conveys the all too real familiarity and ominous depths of our own darkest moral battles. Sketched onto paper in vivid blue pen, </span><i>Head Study </i><span>1992 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-head-study-t14697\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14697</span></a>) – a piece of paper marked with the address 47 Park Street, the hotel that Condo lived at in London during that year – depicts a curly-haired gentleman, mouth wide open in a characteristic display of fear or horror. In typical Condoesque fashion, </span><i>The Three Graces </i><span>1997 (Tate <a class=\"acno-pop\" data-gtm-destination=\"page--artwork\" data-gtm-name=\"body_text_link\" href=\"https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/condo-the-three-graces-t14694\" title=\"View the details of this artwork\"><span>T14694</span></a>) reinvents classical mythology for the modern age with equal measures of reverence and mimicry.</span></p><p><span>Distinctly individual drawings, as well as integral and interrelated components of a larger whole, these drawings act in unison. Arranged in an organic grid-like formation, carefully designed and compositionally balanced by the artist, they reveal the vast breath of Condo’s work, and the way in which his practice is informed – as well as liberated – by a deep and meaningful understanding of both the past and present.</span></p><p><b>Further reading</b><br/><span>Robert Enright, ‘The Undiscovered Familiar: The Art of George Condo’, </span><i>Border Crossings</i><span>, vol.22, May 2003, pp.18–34.</span><br/><i>George Condo: La Civilisation Perdue (The Lost Civilisation)</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Fondation Dina Vierny-Musée Maillol, Paris, April–August 2009.</span><br/><i>George Condo: Mental States</i><span>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London, October 2011–January 2012.</span></p><p><span>Hannah Dewar</span><br/><span>December 2012</span></p><div></div></div>", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2024-05-31T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "animal / human", "animals: fantastic", "animals: mammals", "body", "cartoon / comic strip", "characters", "education, science and learning", "emotions and human qualities", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "formal qualities", "fragmentation", "from recognisable sources", "head / face", "humour", "Huxley, Aldous, ‘Heaven and Hell’, 1956", "Kwakkelstein, Michael, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci as a Physiognomist’, 1994", "lifestyle and culture", "literature and fiction", "literature (not Shakespeare)", "memory", "Mickey Mouse", "mouse", "people", "physiognomy", "popular culture", "psychology", "society", "subconscious", "universal concepts" ]

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[]

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[ { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "1 April 2015 – 1 May 2016", "endDate": "2016-05-01", "id": 9679, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 7956, "startDate": "2015-04-01", "title": "George Condo: Drawings / Paintings", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 15 July 2018", "endDate": "2018-07-15", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "5 December 2016 – 16 July 2017", "endDate": "2017-07-16", "id": 11018, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 9090, "startDate": "2016-12-05", "title": "George Condo", "type": "Collection based display" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "14 June 2023 – 28 April 2024", "endDate": "2024-04-28", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "14 June 2023 – 28 April 2024", "endDate": "2024-04-28", "id": 13350, "startDate": "2023-06-14", "venueName": "Tate Modern (London, UK)", "venueWebsiteUrl": "http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/" } ], "id": 10994, "startDate": "2023-06-14", "title": "The Yageo Exhibition: Capturing the Moment", "type": "Exhibition" }, { "artistRoomsTour": false, "dateText": "29 June 2024 – 16 November 2024", "endDate": "2024-11-16", "exhibitionLegs": [ { "dateText": "29 June 2024 – 16 November 2024", "endDate": "2024-11-16", "id": 15716, "startDate": "2024-06-29", "venueName": "Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts (Kaohsiung, Taiwan)", "venueWebsiteUrl": null } ], "id": 11558, "startDate": "2024-06-29", "title": "Capturing the Moment", "type": "Loan-out" } ]

[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Mental States </i>2000 is a medium-sized oil painting on canvas executed with a dark and sombre palette of black, brown and ochre, in broad and gestural brushstrokes. It<i> </i>depicts a group of figures, densely packed into a crowded space. The body of a naked female form is visible in the bottom right-hand corner, while faces with clenched teeth and bulging eyes loom out of the darkness across the canvas. The painting was first shown in the artist’s solo exhibition at the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont in Paris in 2001. It would later provide the title for Condo’s retrospective exhibition which started at the New Museum, New York in 2011 and toured to the Hayward Gallery in London later that year, as well as to venues in Rotterdam and Frankfurt.</p>\n<p>While Condo has long presented his audiences with strange and grotesque characters, drawn from a range of historical and contemporary genres as well as imaginative speculation, a new group of peculiar beings emerged in his work during a summer holiday in 1996. The artist later named them the ‘Antipodal Beings’; a term taken from English writer Aldous Huxley’s essay of 1956, ‘Heaven and Hell’, which suggested that ‘the mind has its own darkest Africa or outer Antipodes’ and that the inhabitants of this mysterious world exist, in some sense, independently of their creator’ (quoted in Hayward Gallery 2011, p.20). Characterised by distorted forms, protruding chins and oversized eyes bulging with panic, curiosity or rage, the ‘Antipodal Beings’ gradually seeped into Condo’s work over a period of time.</p>\n<p>After discovering in December 2000 a text from 1994 by art historian Michael Kwakkelstein, <i>Leonardo Da Vinci as a Physiognomist</i>, Condo embarked on a study of the science of physiognomy as it had been understood in Renaissance Italy. Using its principles – the perceived correlation between the physical characteristics or character of an individual and their facial configuration – as a conceptual tool, Condo began to consider the way in which it might begin to explain the pervasive power of his oddly peculiar creatures. He has said: ‘It shed some interesting light on the potential of explaining the “Antipodal Beings” as physiognomical variants on the study of human expression … the inner mental state expressed by outward appearance’ (quoted in Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont 2001, p.8).</p>\n<p>In the catalogue to his 2001 exhibition at the Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, in which these works were first exhibited as a group, Condo discussed the discovery of Kwakkelstein’s text and its subsequent impact on his thinking:</p>\n<p class=\"cttext\">\n</p><blockquote>This led me to the concept of ‘Physiognomical Abstraction’, where the mental state or physical representation of the inner consciousness (that of the antipodal beings) and the appearance of the being, which is in effect a collage of memory and experience, can be expressed as the material form that ‘gives out’ consciousness in order to ‘send back’ consciousness into its non-material appearance, and represent the material consciousness of an imaginary being.<br/>(Quoted in Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont 2001, p.8.)</blockquote>\n<p>Considered in the context of such a discovery, <i>Mental States</i> can be seen, as its title suggests, as both a depiction of an individual and a revelation of that individual’s inner consciousness. Translating visual cause into psychological effect, the painting’s dark surface and disjointed imagery suggests a complex and unstable psychosomatic state, characterised by psychotic rage or fear. The proliferation of hovering heads in this particular work – and the presence of a single female body – suggests that it refers to the complex mental state of just one<i> </i>individual.</p>\n<p>Through the repetition of a number of images of the same woman, pictured as a series of faces across the canvas, Condo presents the viewer with a fragmented and fractured inventory of the psyche of one individual. Her conflicting and complex character is portrayed simultaneously, as faces are depicted in various states of mental wellbeing, encompassing a range of emotions from euphoria to rage and despair. As such, the work functions as an inventory of expression, indicating the vast and diverse range of mental states that lie waiting to be uncovered at any one time. Instead of presenting a clear picture of any particular character trait, Condo instead grapples with the complexity of human psychology as a whole, offering a composite image that is fragmented, confused and disturbed. Incorporating a wide range of sources, from cartoons and popular culture to abstract expressionism, Condo articulates mood and emotion in a way that is both comic and powerful. Faces with Mickey Mouse ears and bulging cartoon eyes sit alongside menacing beings with gnarling teeth, revealing the deeply contradictory sides of every human personality.</p>\n<p>Painted with broad, gestural brushstrokes that convey the fluidity of the inner psyche, <i>Mental States </i>is produced with dark and sombre colours. Filled with large and illegible pockets of blackness – punctuated only at intervals by bright highlights or the white of an eye – the palette seems to echo the individual’s troubled state of mind. Whilst the canvas incorporates abstracted shapes as human figures are bent and moulded to purpose, it remains, in essence, a figurative study. Laura Hoptman, contributor to the catalogue for Condo’s exhibition at Hayward Gallery in London in 2011–12, has said: ‘For Condo, “abstract” is a verb; rarely, if ever, is it a noun’ (Laura Hoptman, ‘Abstraction as a State of Mind’, in Hayward Gallery 2011, p.23).</p>\n<p>Condo’s troubled faces are rendered with pathos and sympathy. Far from simple mimicry or caricature, despite their stylised forms, they are simultaneously repellent and endearing, conjuring up a range of conflicting emotions. Reflecting variously the mental states of the female depicted, as well as the artist and the viewer, they evoke the complex and essentially contradictory nature of the human character, alluding to the psychological impact of modern life on the psyche. Condo has said: ‘I would propose that the “Physiognomical Abstractions” are in some sense road maps that lead back into the mental state of the individual consciousness. If one follows the maps he will arrive deeper into his own mind and perhaps even come into contact with his own peripheral beings’ (quoted in Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont<i> </i>2001, pp.8–9).</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>\n<i>George Condo: Physiognomical Abstraction</i>, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris 2001.<br/>\n<i>George Condo: Mental States</i>, exhibition catalogue, Hayward Gallery, London 2011, reproduced p.107.</p>\n<p>Hannah Dewar<br/>December 2012</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2018-06-20T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" } ]

[ "abstraction", "body", "cartoon / comic strip", "characters", "diseases and conditions", "education, science and learning", "emotions and human qualities", "emotions, concepts and ideas", "figure", "formal qualities", "fragmentation", "from recognisable sources", "gestural", "head / face", "health and welfare", "humour", "individuals: female", "literature and fiction", "mental illness", "Mickey Mouse", "people", "physiognomy", "portraits", "psychiatry", "psychology", "society", "subconscious", "universal concepts" ]

[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1963", "fc": "Teresa Margolles", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/teresa-margolles-10061" } ]

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[ { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>\n<i>Flag I</i> 2009 is comprised of a piece of fabric hanging from a flag pole. Having been used to clean the sites of violent deaths in Mexico, the fabric is soiled with blood, earth and other substances. It can be shown in the open air like an ordinary national or institutional flag. Margolles exhibited a version of the work at the Venice Biennale in 2009 as part of her exhibition in the Mexican pavilion, <i>What Else Could We Talk About?</i>. <i>Flag I </i>was included in the exhibition <i>No Lone Zone</i> at Tate Modern in London in 2012. Having based her early work on her experiences working in a morgue, Margolles has subsequently chosen to work directly on the streets of Mexico at scenes of recent conflict, particularly in Ciudad Juárez and other cities in northern Mexico whose proximity to the United States has made them sites for drug trafficking and the violence associated with it.</p>\n<p>Born in Culiacán in the north-western state of Sinaloa in Mexico, Margolles studied forensic medicine, becoming familiar with working with dead bodies and becoming aware of the crime and violence directly related to the drug trade in Mexico. Margolles entered the artistic world through her involvement with SEMEFO, an underground group that appropriated their name from the acronym of the Servicio Médico Forense, a forensic institute in Mexico that also directs the morgues. SEMEFO members were part of the alternative music scene and were often invited to take part in artistic events. Margolles left SEMEFO in the late 1990s and started to work on her own as an artist. Over the years her practice has become increasingly minimalist while maintaining a focus on the subjects of death, violence and exclusion. Margolles’s work often examines the politics of the dead body, particularly the way bodies condemned to oblivion through violence caused by poverty and social exclusion can return to disrupt the political space. Although rooted in a specific context, her work speaks to other audiences through its presentation – rather than representation – of the aftermath of violence.</p>\n<p>Margolles has worked on many occasions with bodily fluids. <i>Vaporización</i> 2001, for instance, consists of a series of humidifiers – of the kind used in museums or archives – which expel a delicate column of mist. The water in the humidifiers comes from the cleaning of corpses in Mexican morgues so that the viewer is confronted with a visual image of death which in turn is inscribed upon his or her body. For her participation in the Havana Biennial in 2000, Margolles smuggled human fat to Cuba and painted an outdoor wall with it. A similar strategy was used in Margolles’s <i>What Else Could We Talk About? </i>in Venice in 2009, where the floor of the Palazzo Rota-Ivancich was mopped continuously by paid workers with a fluid made of water and blood from murder sites in Mexico. In this work, the site of the violent act was transferred metaphorically to the exhibition site, and the viewers were obliged to walk on the remnants of the killings. Similarly, <i>37 Bodies </i>2007 (Tate L03369) memorialises Mexican murder victims with short pieces of surgical thread (used to sew up bodies after autopsy) knotted together to form a single line across the exhibition space, claiming visibility for the no longer visible.</p>\n<p>\n<b>Further reading</b>\n<br/>Taiyana Pimentel, Elmer Mendoza, Teresa Margolles and Cuauhtémoc Medina (eds.), <i>What Else Could We Talk About?</i>, exhibition catalogue, Mexican Pavilion, Venice Biennale, Venice 2008.<br/>Alpha Escobedo, Leobardo Alvarado, Rein Wolfs and Letizia Ragaglia, <i>Frontera</i>, exhibition catalogue, Kunsthalle Friedricianum, Kassel, and Museion, Cologne 2011.</p>\n<p>José Roca<br/>October 2012</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Summary", "publication_date": "2016-06-09T00:00:00", "slug_name": "summary", "type": "SHORT_TEXT" }, { "ajax_url": null, "canonical_url": null, "content": "<div class=\"text\">\n<p>The fabric of <i>Flag I</i> contains traces of blood, soil and other substances from the sites of murders around the northern border of Mexico, testifying to the thousands of violent deaths associated with the powerful drug cartels that control smuggling routes to the United States. Another version of this work was shown at the Venice Biennial in 2009, where Margolles represented Mexico with an exhibition titled <i>What Else Could We Talk About?</i> As the government failed to intervene in the drug wars, the blood-stained cloth was hung outside the Mexican pavilion as a memorial for citizens that the nation ignored.</p>\n</div>\n", "display_name": "Display caption", "publication_date": "2015-11-26T00:00:00", "slug_name": "display-caption", "type": "DISPLAY_CAPTION" } ]

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[ { "append_role_to_name": false, "date": "born 1982", "fc": "Simon Fujiwara", "prepend_role_to_name": false, "role_display": "artist", "url": "https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/simon-fujiwara-13801" } ]

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