Text by Ralph Rugoff, Laura Hoptman, Will Self, David Means.
Painter and sculptor George Condo (born 1957) has inhabited a broad swath of cultural contexts over his three-decade career, from the early-1980s East Village scene to a collaboration with William Burroughs to making album cover art for Phish and, most recently, Kanye West. Early in his career, Condo was friendly with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and briefly worked at Andy Warhol's Factory. Having been included in the Whitney Biennial in 1987, by 2010 he was once again judged so original that a bronze sculpture of his was placed in that year's Biennial. Condo's loose, imaginative approach to portraiture has distinguished him throughout the decades: "There was a time when I realized that the central focal point of portraiture did not have to be representational in any way," he said in 1992. "You don't need to paint the body to show the truth about a character. All you need is the head and the hands." George Condo: Mental States surveys the artist's career from 1982 to the present day, focusing on his portrait paintings but also including a selection of sculptural busts made in materials such as gold and bronze. Organized by theme, and including 100 images of artworks in addition to writings by Will Self, David Means, Ralph Rugoff and Laura Hoptman, this volume explores Condo's relationship to art history, popular culture and contemporary society.
Featured image, "Spatial Figures" (2010), is reproduced from George Condo: Mental States, in which Laura Hoptman writes, "Throughout his career, Condo has exhibited an astonishing ability to channel an art-history primer's worth of artist. He uses the languages of modernist abstraction like a palette: Matisse, Klee, Tanguy, Gorky, de Kooning, Pollock and Picasso—always Picasso, whose vocabulary is the basis for all the others."
STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.
FROM THE BOOK
"Somewhere in the voluminous writings of Oliver Sacks, the valetudinarian neurologist and savant, he describes following a woman with Tourette's Syndrome along a busy Manhattan street. Every single person the Tourettic woman passed she was compelled to imitate; and this was not merely an assumption of facial expression—nor yet merely of gait or mannerism or voice—but an impersonation tout ensemble: an entire assumption of the other, which seemed—to Sacks—to capture the totality of what might well be those passers-by's very being. Worse was to come, for when the woman reached the end of the block, she dived into an alleyway, and there, isolated, she regurgitated all of these moues, grimaces and postures in a frenzied twitchery—a spew of other psyches. To me, the portraiture of George Condo is an analogue of this neurological syndrome, sparking in the realm of the aesthetic."
--Will Self, excerpted from his essay, "Believing in the Cow: The Psychopathoanathemas Pronounced by George Condo," reproduced from George Condo: Mental States.
FORMAT: Hbk, 11 x 11.75 in. / 168 pgs / 125 color. LIST PRICE: U.S. $50.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $67.5 ISBN: 9781853322891 PUBLISHER: Hayward Gallery Publishing AVAILABLE: 4/30/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA ME
Published by Hayward Gallery Publishing. Text by Ralph Rugoff, Laura Hoptman, Will Self, David Means.
Painter and sculptor George Condo (born 1957) has inhabited a broad swath of cultural contexts over his three-decade career, from the early-1980s East Village scene to a collaboration with William Burroughs to making album cover art for Phish and, most recently, Kanye West. Early in his career, Condo was friendly with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring and briefly worked at Andy Warhol's Factory. Having been included in the Whitney Biennial in 1987, by 2010 he was once again judged so original that a bronze sculpture of his was placed in that year's Biennial. Condo's loose, imaginative approach to portraiture has distinguished him throughout the decades: "There was a time when I realized that the central focal point of portraiture did not have to be representational in any way," he said in 1992. "You don't need to paint the body to show the truth about a character. All you need is the head and the hands." George Condo: Mental States surveys the artist's career from 1982 to the present day, focusing on his portrait paintings but also including a selection of sculptural busts made in materials such as gold and bronze. Organized by theme, and including 100 images of artworks in addition to writings by Will Self, David Means, Ralph Rugoff and Laura Hoptman, this volume explores Condo's relationship to art history, popular culture and contemporary society.
