Rodrigo with Female

细节

George Condo (b. 1957)
Rodrigo with Female
signed and dated 'Condo 07' (upper left)
oil, pastel and charcoal on canvas
46 x 52¾ in. (116.8 x 133.4 cm.)
Executed in 2007.

来源

Galerie Andrea Caratsch, Zurich
Acquired from the above by the present owner

展览

Paris, Fondation Dina Vierny - Musée Maillol, George Condo, La Civilisation Perdue, April-August, 2009.

更多详情

In his charismatic artistic practice, George Condo does not work from models or photographs, nor does he create a single sketch before he begins a painting. While art history, celebrities and current events serve as inspiration for Condo, his compositions of abstracted and distorted people, both real and imaginary, are constructed in his mind’s eye and then directly translated onto the canvas. Condo categorizes his style of painting as artificial realism, a process of realistically depicting the artificial. By artificial, he is referring to his self-imagined subjects with contorted faces and exaggerated features. Interestingly, through his exclusively internal creative process, Condo is creating an external, visual platform for both the ideas in his mind and for our elusive mental states.

In this work, Rodrigo, one of Condo’s reoccurring imaginary figures, is depicted as a small head nestled in the lap of one of the female nudes. Condo identifies Rodrigo as a butler, a stoic character, always watching but never commenting. While looking at the painting, one cannot help but notice how the subject matter, composition, and geometric abstraction of the faces resemble Picasso’s iconic work, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. This work exemplifies Condo’s interest in art history as well as his painterly abilities and inventive mind.