Lot 2
  • 2

George Condo

Estimate
70,000 - 90,000 GBP
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Description

  • George Condo
  • The Insane Cardinal
  • signed and dated 2003 on the reverse
  • oil on canvas
  • 177.8 by 152.4cm.
  • 70 by 60in.
  • Executed in 2003.

Provenance

Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Exhibited

Cambridge, Harvard University Carpenter Center, George Condo, 2003
Paris, Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, George Condo - Memories of Manet and Velazquez, 2004, p. 29, illustrated in colour and p. XXVII, illustrated
Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, The 48th Corcoran Biennial:  Closer to Home, 2005, p. 39, illustrated

Catalogue Note

Executed in 2003 and first exhibited at a select solo show at the Carpenter Center, George Condo’s The Insane Cardinal is a wonderful and witty example of his painterly vision which combines art historical referentiality with the artist’s rampant imagination. One of six paintings exhibited, the present work, alongside The Policeman and The Executive, depicts an amalgam figure whose broad title suggests he is a stock archetype. Condo calls his characters ‘antipodal beings’, borrowing a concept from Aldous Huxley’s Heaven and Hell. Constructed according to the Surrealist/Dadaist aesthetic previously explored by Condo in earlier series, the protagonist is depicted as a bottle-headed, red-caped man drinking champagne while riding on what appears to be a wheel. In particular, the peg-leg suggests the influence of George Grosz, a prominent figure in the Dada movement.

 

To create these compelling, clownish figures, Condo borrows techniques from the annals of art history and The Insane Cardinal reads like a coda to earlier artistic movements. The vague, empty setting, the bubbles and the attention to the folds of the drapery recall the painterly displays practiced by the Old Masters, while the red gown specifically references Velázquez, fresh in the artist’s memory after the Manet/ Velázquez exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the previous year.

 

Unlike his appropriationist peers, however, Condo never utilizes his source images wholesale, nor does he borrow ready-made styles directly.  While one may compare Condo’s reorganising of anatomies with those of Picasso’s aggressively stylized portraits from the 1930s, Condo’s paintings separate him from his predecessor by addressing the viewer from an entirely different perspective. Since his debut exhibition at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York in 1983, he has continued in his own distinctive and original manner to produce a specific type of portraiture.  Beginning with his clown paintings in the early 1980s, Condo’s exploration into this genre reflected a highly unconventional approach based upon memory, presenting the viewer with a ribald insight into his nomadic imagination. Here, the removal of the crucial signifier – the head – which is normally the focal point of the genre, adds to the ambiguity of interpretation. Belonging to an illusory world in which the foundations have yet to be solidified, the resulting figures are rendered in a style that Condo coined ‘Artificial Realism’: the realistic representation of the artificial. The Insane Cardinal is imbued with the absurd humour that is the hallmark of Condo’s vision.

 

Although the viewer is separated from Condo’s imaginary world, the characters that appear in his work slowly begin to inhabit our space. In The Insane Cardinal, the gallery-going audience sees a sardonic reflection of themselves in the protagonist’s hand – with protruding little finger in accordance with high-society etiquette – which holds a champagne glass, mirroring the crowd at an opening night reception. Continuing the aesthetic of Duchamp and the Dadaists, there is a suggestion here that Condo points the finger of fun at the very audience who admire his work.