THE JOURNAL
Mr George Condo, London, 2014. Photograph by Ms Sarah Lee/The Guardian
The Entrance To The Void exhibition in Los Angeles showcases the work of Mr George Condo.
If you haven’t heard Mr George Condo’s name before, you will have seen his bizarre, brilliantly disturbing work. The New York-based artist is the man responsible for the five gnomic cover designs of Mr Kanye West’s 2010 lauded album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (one of which was banned by Walmart for being too risqué). In fact, Messrs Condo and West are not only friends and frequent collaborators (in 2013 the artist hand-painted a Hermès Birkin bag for Mr West to give Ms Kim Kardashian West), they also share a certain cut-and-paste approach in their creative endeavours.
“Entrance To The Void” (2015) by Mr George Condo. © Mr George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers
Where Mr West can take a forgotten hook from an old soul song and transform it into something new and magnificent, Mr Condo does the same with the history of painting, using his canvases to mash together references to everything from cubism to pop, half-borrowing and transforming the colours and shapes of such artistic forebears as Picasso, Goya and even Rococo painter Mr Jean-Honoré Fragonard, all of whom he studied during a 10-year stint in Paris in the mid-1980s.
“Orange And Green Diagonal Portrait” (2016) by Mr George Condo. © George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers
The resulting paintings, which often feature fragmented, grinning faces, are full of contradictions, both playful and menacing, beautifully composed and artfully destructive. Mr Condo calls this “artificial realism”. “That’s what I do,” he told The Guardian in 2014. “I try to depict a character’s train of thoughts simultaneously – hysteria, joy, sadness, desperation. If you could see these things at once, that would be like what I’m trying to make you see in my art.”
“Impressions Of Goya 3” (2016) by Mr George Condo. © Mr George Condo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY, 2016. Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers
There’s no need to take just his word for it. Entrance To The Void, which opened yesterday at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles, is an exhibition of new paintings by the artist, including a series of “cubist portraits” and a series, Impressions Of Goya 1-3, that pays homage to the Spanish old master. The void of the show’s title is the grey area that lies between figuration and abstraction in painting, and many of the pieces playfully wrench at such distinctions. Head on down and, who knows, you may bump into a certain person being “as close to dream state as possible”.
Entrance To The Void is on at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles until 11 June