For many of us, this year has run us through the gamut. And not just of emotions, but of our many possible identities. For the artist Mr George Condo, who often creates characters with a kaleidoscopic complexity, this feeling of multiplicity, of our many selves fracturing and rioting and raging within, became inspiration for a new cycle of work, Internal Riot – on exhibit now at Hauser & Wirth in New York.  

Fans of Mr Condo’s work will recognise many of the motifs at play here – in pieces such as “The New Normal”, “End Of Reason” and “There’s No Business Like No Business” – a kind of panicked composure, or vice versa. Pop, Cubism, anime, Messrs Walt Disney and MC Escher, the characters within this cycle contain multitudes of references and riffs on the references. But, notably, all of these figures feel somehow naked, adrift, removed from the artist’s usual play on a great master’s backdrop – these are people exiled from their normal reality.

“The pandemic has forced us into that strange, unidentified region of the mind where it seems to function on its own without any guidance,” Mr Condo writes in the artist statement accompanying the new pieces. “I protested with my paintings. In a psychological sense, I lit them on fire and turned them upside down in revolt and sickness.”

Of the pieces themselves, he says some “took days, others weeks. Some took only hours. And then the days of doing nothing seemed longer, the elasticity of time became apparent to everyone I know. People call on the phone and can’t remember what day it is anymore, can’t remember what they ‘used to do’ or know what in fact they ever will do. There is a migratory sense in the air. People want to move... with no clear path in sight.”

Mr Condo himself has regularly moved throughout his life and career, from his native New Hampshire to Lowell, Massachusetts, for college, where he studied history and music theory, and then on to NYC where he worked in Mr Andy Warhol’s Factory, while he and his pals (from Mr Jean-Michel Basquiat to Mr Keith Haring) became the artist-kings of the East Village. In the time since, whether at home in Manhattan, or in jaunts to Paris and Los Angeles, Mr Condo has sought out artists and creators to collaborate with. He befriended the Beats (Messrs William S Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, specifically), worked with Messrs Kanye West and Travis Scott, and made some really wild masks for a video with Mr Adam Kimmel for his shortlived but beloved menswear line.

On the occasion of his Internal Riot, we asked Mr Condo about keeping the paint off his clothes, and keeping all the chaos on the canvas.

A lot of people are struggling with a kind of grief for the selves they’d planned to be and the things they’d planned to do. And that mourning creates a crazy cocktail of emotion. Is there any kind of catharsis in the act of painting these works?

Yes, there most definitely is. There is an exorcism of sorts, rooting out the demons inside of us all, those demons that were imposed from external forces. I feel as if each painting is a cathartic moment where this experience is played out.

**People have been joking online about what they ought to have done during lockdown – comparing ourselves to Mr William Shakespeare who wrote **King Lear** in quarantine, or to Ms Zadie Smith, whose recent essay collection was conceived, written and released since March. Your accomplishment here is certainly impressive. Are you always as conscious of the outside stimulus affecting your output, creating a kind of call and response like this?**

The work is usually a reaction to my impulsive state of mind and whatever is going through it. Some funny things, like realising I’ve watched the same boxing match three times in the last month and forgot, happened. I spent a lot of time texting and talking on the phone to avoid simply making art every minute, but other than that there was not a lot to do except watch how the outside world had turned itself upside down.

Did you spend a lot or any of this time in complete solitude?

I luckily have two intelligent and artistically talented daughters who would come out to visit occasionally. We’d sit outside and hang out for the day in the summer. I have a “plus one” as well, an extraordinarily talented violinist by the name of Leila Josefowicz. She’s a world-famous performer and she would get tested and come out to stay for a few days at a time. It was great to hear her practise in the house, cook together and listen to her play in the studio while I painted.

_I’m curious about your relationship with New York, with the physical city as it is now, and what you think has changed, say, since the pirate-utopian days there in the 1980s? _

I actually only went back into the city once since March, then went back in again to do my installation at Hauser & Wirth. I left again immediately following that. The utopic universe of the non-existent world is quite strange since it has all changed. Sometimes I think of Stanley Kubrick and 2001: A Space Odyssey. It feels more like that than ever.

_This series of work is somewhat about fractured mindsets. Were you, in the Before Times, a big adherent to a routine? _

My routine, if you could call it that, is certainly to have a few espressos in the morning, go out to the studio and see what I did the night before. Examine it fresh in the morning and see if I want to make any changes. Usually this happens around 7.30am. Then I either just start doing it, or I go into the house and think about whether I want to do emails or paint.

I think of painting as a wonderful, if messy affair. What do you wear to work?

It depends so much on the weather, to be honest. I usually just wear a black Lacoste polo, since it’s going to get paint all over it anyway. Same for the pants and shoes. They just get nailed in there with paint splats and smudges. The whole studio is a mess, no doubt – it’s so small that you can reach every table and go at the paintings from any given angle all at once. When the paintings arrive in the gallery and it’s all so clean and perfect; it’s a good feeling to know that what’s inside the work really stayed there and they are ready to live on with a life of their own.

_Where do you think you got your dress sense from? _

When I first got to the city in 1979, my dress code was modelled after the kind of neo-punk style. Then I went to Paris and shopped at Sulka, which doesn’t exist anymore. I bought everything from there and from Charvet, which was up the street at the Place Vendôme, since I lived at the Hotel Lotti on Rue de Castiglione.

Your work obviously has a lot of interplay with literature and music. What have you have been reading, listening to and watching during lockdown? Are you bingeing Netflix shows, or reading Mr Burroughs, or both?

Funnily enough, I’m watching a lot of cooking recipes online, like 10 different ways to make any given dish. I’ve been following Jason Bourne, trying to figure out which passport he should use. And sometimes I watch various performances of classical music on YouTube. I guess you’d call it comparative listening, I might hear a number of different lutenists play the same piece and try to decide which I like the best. I need to get my eyes checked, so I haven’t been reading all that much.