George Condo
The Mad and the Lonely

The Mad and the Lonely will feature a number of small-scale paintings and sculptures selected from the artist’s long-standing career. Following in the tradition of portraiture, the works in the exhibition offer depictions of the disparate souls in life, who have been rejected by society and who linger between states of madness and loneliness. Victims of their own internal circumstances, these characters are rendered in the abstracted, often eerie but, at the same time, humanoid-like manner that is distinctive of George Condo’s idiosyncratic style.

While exploring the art of the past, from the Renaissance and the Baroque, to Cubism, Surrealism, and Pop Art, Condo creates his own visual language by breaking from the formality of traditional portrait painting and the vocabulary of Modernism and abstraction. At first sight, works such as Woman with Bear (1997) seem to be borrowing from the principles of Cubism, by which subjects are broken down and depicted from multiple perspectives at once. In fact, however, the distorted figures in such works are composed of an array of simultaneous emotional states and are brought to life through what the artist himself refers to as “Psychological Cubism”. Contrasting states of emotions such as joy and agony are similarly concurrently revealed in sculptures aptly titled Lunatic (2009) and Renegade (2009), as well as in portraits like Don Rodrigo (2010) and The Jester (2019), which seem to allude to Velázquez and Rembrandt and where deformed, grotesque figures with exaggerated features take center-stage, blurring the line between figuration and abstraction.