W ith a blend of provocation and wit, George Condo's Maja Vestida offers a mischievous and psychologically charged homage to one of art history’s most iconic reclining nudes: Francisco Goya’s La Maja Vestida from circa 1800–1807. Refracted through Condo’s singularly surreal and visceral aesthetic, the work stands as a bold intervention in the lineage of portraiture, uniting classical precedent with the grotesque, the erotic, and the absurd.

Rather than simply reinterpreting Goya’s composition, Condo fractures it—recasting the reclining figure as an uncanny amalgam of desire, theatricality, and psychic unrest. Draped in a voluminous black fur and sprawled provocatively across a divan, the woman stares out with brazen confidence, her form marked by exaggerated features and unsettling detail. Animistic hands, seemingly fused with the fur, clutch a burning cigarette as smoke curls into the air. Condo’s brushwork shifts fluidly between expressive painterliness and satirical distortion, amplifying the tension between beauty and madness, reverence and parody.

“Unlike in caricature…the preposterous features of these figures are in fact rendered with great sympathy. Drawing on the traditional rhetoric of portraiture, Condo imbues his invented subjects with a compelling psychological presence”
- Ralph Rugoff, ‘The Mental States of America,’ in: Exh. Cat., London, Hayward Gallery, George Condo: Mental States, 2011-12, p. 16

The face, as ever in Condo’s portraits, becomes the locus of psychic drama. Disfigured yet uncannily expressive, the sitter's features are a riot of competing expressions and stylistic registers: bulbous eyes peer outward from a mask-like visage; a manic grin is paired with a vacant stare. Her pearl necklace and delicately coiffed hair suggest bourgeois refinement, while her animal-like limbs and exaggerated anatomy teeter on the edge of the grotesque. This tension between the civilized and the primal lies at the heart of Condo’s practice—a recurring meditation on the dualities of human nature.

Left: Francisco Goya, La maja desnuda, 1797-1800. Museo del Prado, Madrid. Right: Francisco Goya, La maja vestida, 1798-1805. Museo del Prado, Madrid.

The painting’s title, Maja Vestida (“The Clothed Maja”), is itself a sly provocation, as the subject here is provocatively naked save for her fur wrap. Condo’s inversion of Goya’s title points to his ongoing fascination with the collapse of binaries: clothed and nude, classical and contemporary, sacred and profane. In Goya’s original works—the Maja Desnuda and Maja Vestida—the figure remains largely identical in pose and gaze, her two states of undress offered as a moral and aesthetic paradox. In Condo’s hands, this paradox becomes even more unstable, transformed into a carnivalesque tableau of fragmented identity and performed eroticism.

The present work installed in Existential Portraits at Luhring Augustine, New York, May - June 2006. Art © 2025 George Condo / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Painted at the height of Condo’s engagement with psychological portraiture, Maja Vestida exemplifies his Existential Portraits series, in which the artist probed the depths of human consciousness through imagined sitters rendered in his inimitable “Artificial Realism.” Condo has long cited an interest in his Cubist predecessors, layering multiple emotional states and stylistic vocabularies within a single figure. In this sense, Maja Vestida is less a depiction of a woman than a kaleidoscopic embodiment of contradictions—sensuality and anxiety, comedy and horror, form and formlessness.

Pablo Picasso, Susanna and the Elders, 1955. Museo Picasso Málaga. Art © 2025 Estate of Pablo Picasso / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The setting itself contributes to the surreal charge of the composition. Ornamental wallpaper in cobalt and gold evokes an opulent, almost Moorish interior, while the tiling beneath the chaise longue adds a cold, clinical edge to the otherwise theatrical mise-en-scène. The space feels at once lavish and claustrophobic—a dreamscape where the boundaries of time and place dissolve. Condo’s chromatic dexterity is on full display: from the warm tonalities of the flesh to the glistening whites of her jewelry and teeth, the palette oscillates between opulence and decay.

Ultimately, Maja Vestida is a masterful distillation of Condo’s enduring preoccupations: the tension between beauty and monstrosity, the artifice of portraiture, and the fractured nature of modern subjectivity. In its bold confrontation with the past—and its unflinching look at the raw interiority of the human form—Maja Vestida captures Condo at his most provocative, and his most profound.