George Condo

Skarstedt Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

This work is in excellent condition overall. There are accretions scattered across the surface of the work which are inherent to the artist's working method. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
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“I wanted to capture the characters in these paintings at the extreme height of whatever moment they’re in – in that static moment of chaos.”
George Condo

In Street Fair in New York, George Condo has meritoriously managed to capture the utter disarray one experiences while amongst a bustling street fair in New York City. The work bears witness to the chimerical hybridization that is synonymous with the artist’s ingenious treatment of the contemporary psyche. Much like the raucous atmosphere of a street carnival, our eye is left flitting around the surface of this canvas unsure where to look or where to settle. Condo’s stylized and iconic paintings present a singularly apposite commentary on contemporary society through their instantly recognizable distortions and geometric additions. This large-scale work draws on the techniques and styles of his Modernist predecessors while exploring what he has called “abstract figuration”.
Since the early 1980s, Condo has pioneered a hybrid-topography of the human figure, inventing a fictional schema as a means to explore the tenets of subjectivity. Born of an intense dialogue between art history and popular culture, Condo’s paintings conjure stylistic traits that are absorbed from a multitude of canonical influences. The artist’s first mature painting, The Madonna, 1982, an Old Master–style portrait, launched Condo on a career-long exploration of hybridized historical styles and genres. Spanning from Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Ingres, Manet, Goya, Velázquez, Géricault, to caricature, comics and the Looney Tunes, Condo draws from an enormous repository of pictorial signifiers, corporeally melding their protean features into a unique brand of psychologically charged portraiture. Yet, instead of merely copying these styles, Condo appropriates and internalizes a multiplicity of pictorial languages to construct a new, contemporary vision of painting; “I love the idea of two incompatible worlds brought together – opposing forces harmonically melded” (George Condo cited in: Diane Solway, ‘Musings On A Muse,’ W Magazine, January 2013, online resource).
The 1987 Whitney Biennial exhibited Condo’s 1985–86 painting Dancing to Miles—a lively allover composition of biomorphic forms that recalls the work of Gorky and Matta—along with two other of his recent works. The work was instrumental to the revival of painting in the 1980s. Since then, Condo has continued to pursue his singular project across figurative and abstract painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture for more than thirty years. While Street Fair in New York has many obvious structural similarities to Dancing to Miles, the present work displays both years of development in his caricaturist style as well as the intentional blend of playfulness and uneasiness he is attempting to capture in the street fair experience. In a conversation with Ralph Rugoff, director of London’s Hayward Gallery, Condo effectively encapsulates the opus behind his iconic style, which shines through so prominently in this work; “Essentially what I am painting is the state in which the image-time of one reality superimposed in a field of another simultaneous presence now becomes a new conjunctive hyper-reality or hybrid image showing the simultaneous presences” (George Condo cited in: Ralph Rugoff, ‘The Enigma of Jean Louis,’ George Condo: Existential Portraits, Berlin 2006, pp. 7-13).
In Street Fair in New York, Condo scaffolds the picture plane with an undecipherable number of figures – males, females, couples and nudes. Captivating in size, the painting offers us idiosyncratic features of Condo’s oeuvre, such as the contorted, buck-toothed faces and a highly disruptive environment, in a composition that almost appears to be the worked and reworked pages of an artist’s sketchbook. Characteristic of Condo’s works, the personal and art historical, the subjective and objective, and the inside and outside are inseparably interwoven. The below quotation by Calvin Tomkins is epitomized by the female nude we can see on the right of the canvas, in her reverse three-quarter profile and with her two color toned body, that clearly relates to so many female nudes in the rich history of art; “Generally speaking, Condo’s subjects come straight from his imagination, where the sleep of reason produces not only monsters (grotesque faces with three or four rows of ferocious-looking teeth, copulating couples who look straight at the viewer and scream angry imprecations) but also voluptuously realistic nude bodies and beautiful, faceless mannequins in period costumes. Condo’s subject matter...can be simultaneously hilarious and scarifying” (Calvin Tomkins, “Portraits of Imaginary People: How George Condo Reclaimed Old Master Painting,” The New Yorker, January 17, 2011).
Street Fair in New York is a dynamic and stimulating painting that offers more to us than the quintessential Condo experience. The artist refuses to establish any sense of depth in this painting by using a limited and muted palette that empowers all areas of the painting, ultimately forcing us to confront the frenzied plethora of figures. Street Fair in New York is at the same time an outstanding synthesis of art history and the grotesque, and an extraordinary examination of the deepest recesses of the psychological.