It is a theme that harkens to his earlier works – stylized takes on famous motifs like the screaming head at the center of Picasso’s Guernica, or the Old Masters he nods to in 2001’s The Cracked Cardinal among others. Photograph: © George Condo / Artists Rights Society/Courtesy the artist and Sprüth MagersĪ series of three portraits inspired by Francisco de Goya’s The Countess of Carpio, Marquesa de la Solana, feature the dark monochromatic background of the original, but in Condo’s version the face of the Countess is demolished. I’m getting them out of my system,” he explains. “It’s the obliteration of the characters that keep haunting me. His compositions tend toward verticality, a gap bordered by black or, as he puts it: “A curtain you can look through into this mental landscape.” The tall space in the middle is populated with clamoring shapes and screaming faces, the monsters ever present, diminished in size though not in number. In works like Reflections in My Mind and Zombie Modernism the paint is applied liberally, sculpted up and off the canvas in a nod to late Van Gogh works like Mulberry Tree. It seemed time to add a new weapon to his arsenal – a palette knife. He bristled at the idea of covering the works in glass, so instead decided to move away from pastel and charcoal. Back then, he quickly realized he would have to take measures to ensure that his drawings didn’t disappear, smeared on the shoulder of some oaf in an overcoat. These, along with abstract portraits and compositions like Landslide and Tumbling Forms, mark a departure from Condo’s previous work involving drawing, pastel and charcoal like those in his 2014 London shows at Skarstedt and Simon Lee galleries. Photograph: © George Condo / Artists Rights Society/Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers
I was in five different places in my mind at the same time.” When he was diagnosed, he says: “I was just freaking out doing these paintings. As is his custom, the new work combines elements of masters like Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon without ever stooping to gimmickry. He seems energized as he nears the canvas, a self-portrait in monochrome quadrants, each with features rendered in expressionistic blurs.
“I was starting to feel very scrambled up and thinking about my kids and how bad my situation was,” he says in a voice still raspy from surgery. A bout with cancer of the vocal cords last year spawned a bigger, badder breed of demon to exorcise, which Condo confronted with the only weapon he knows – his paintbrush. But in his latest show, Entrance to the Void at Spruth Magers in Los Angeles, the monsters are of a different kind. I t seems as though there have always been monsters lurking in George Condo’s artwork, whether it be the psychological cubist portraits depicting various emotional states, or the white demon that graces the cover of Kanye West’s 2010 album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
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