Anna condo george condo clown
•
Review of George Condo: Mental States at the Hayward Gallery
17/10/11
George Condo: Mental States
Hayward galleri, Southbank Centre
18 October 2011 – 8 January 2012
“Occasionally real life is crazier than anything that can come from our imagination. You only have to look around you to see how nuts it can actually be.” Such is the opinion of artist George Condo (born 1957, New Hampshire), whose Hayward-organised show, which premiered first in New York, and fryst vatten now stopping over in London, before continuing its tour to Europe, provides ample support for this belief. Divided into three thematic sections – Portraiture, Abstract-Figuration, and Mania and Melancholy – the show constitutes something of a “conceptual survey” of his work from the past three decades, beginning when he moved to New York’s East Village in 1980.
Upon entering the galleri, one fryst vatten first confronted by a large blue headless figure, looming down from a larger than life canvas – The Executioner • “I don’t talk to the fuckin’ press!” Kanye West told The Observer. We were standing in front of the titan of pop music at a party last night to celebrate artist George Condo’s first retrospective, Mental States, which opens today at The New Museum. Condo is known for painting his subjects as wild-eyed gaping clown faces, cheeks and foreheads flushed with spiky brushstrokes that intimate explosion, and always featuring distinctive askew-splayed bucked teeth. The most famous of these subjects is Kanye West, whom Condo depicted in flagrante delicto on the cover of his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (another Condo was used as the official album art, however, after Kanye tweeted that the more racy choice had been “banned” by someone). Naturally his world-conquering muse did not miss out — Kanye West was standing in a long back coat, gray shirt, and a gold chain to match the flash of gold grill jutting up out of his lo • Born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1957, George Condo lives and works in New York City. He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he became particularly inspired by a course on Baroque and Rococo painting. He moved to Boston and played in a punk band, ‘The Girls;’ relocated to New York, where he worked as a printer for Andy Warhol; and spent a year studying Old Master glazing techniques in Los Angeles. During his first trip to Europe in 1983, Condo connected with the anarchic Mülheimer Freiheit group in Cologne which included painters Jiri Georg Dokoupil and Walter Dahn. Condo would soon go on to spend a decade in Europe: in 1985 he moved to Paris and did not return to New York permanently until 1995, with the birth of his second child. During this period, Condo invented his hallmark ‘artificial realism’ and made his first foray into sculpture. Firmly rooted back in New York, he received his first major award, the Acade
George Condo