George Condo

The exhibition opens with Condo’s dialogue with Western art history, staging his audacious reinterpretations of masters from Rembrandt to Picasso. These works reveal how the artist integrates references from the past into a distinctive, unsettling visual universe.

A central part of the exhibition is devoted to “Artificial Realism”, a concept coined by Condo to describe works created in the style and techniques of the past yet infused with elements of graffiti and cartoon imagery, generating temporal dissonance. This is followed by the presentation of the “Collages” and “Combination Paintings”, two bodies of work through which the artist reformulates art history by accumulation or confrontation.

The visitor is then led through sections highlighting Condo’s literary connections, particularly with the Beat Generation, before entering a cabinet of drawings that retrace his career from early sketches to recent works on paper.

The representation of the human figure stands at the core of his practice. Through portraits of imaginary beings he calls “humanoids”, Condo depicts the complexity of the psyche. The notion of “psychological cubism” defines his method of representing multiple, contradictory emotions within a single image.

The final section explores his relationship with abstraction, from early gestural canvases to monochromes in black, white, and blue, culminating in the recent “Diagonal” series (2023–2024). Together, these works highlight the artist’s constant reinvention of his pictorial language and his insatiable drive to expand painting’s possibilities.