With his arresting, unsettling style, George Condo emerged out of the dynamism of the New York art scene in the early 1980s, and he has been restlessly painting, drawing and sculpting — bringing forms into the world in one way or another — ever since. Reliably inconsistent, Condo's references and inspirations, in both style and content, ricochet deliriously around the canon of western art history. Somewhere between his fake Tiepolos, reconfigured Manets, impossibly intricate paintings that seem to be abstract until you get up close, his perpetually screaming cubist hags, and the orgiastic misdemeanours of Rodrigo, Condo has invented, mastered, and expanded not just one painterly language but the whole lexicon. Working closely with the artist, writer and art historian Simon Baker has combined biographical, chronological, and thematic approaches to survey George Condo's work and career to date. It includes an introductory essay on Condo's contradictory nature and a chapter exploring his early career are followed by three thematic chapters that look at the years from 1984 to the present, tracing Condo's different systematic approaches to the language of painting, exploring his relationship to the concept of abstraction, and probing the darker side of his psychological iconography.
