George Condo has been a pivotal figure of American contemporary art, was best buds with Basquiat and Keith Haring, worked for Warhol and did Kanye West’s album cover. With his debut Hong Kong exhibition scheduled for the end of this month, we spoke to the artist about what's to come.
George Condo wishes he could return to 1988, when the American artist wrote Notes on Artificial Realism, a treatise describing his artistic direction. In it, he emphasised the artificiality of his drawings—“an object that was real is made artificial in order to bring it back to reality”—and coined the term “fake paintings” to define his oeuvre.
Today, in Trump’s America, that haunts him. “The phenomenon of fake news is precisely defined in the treatise,” he says from his studio in New York. “Had I known those concepts would blur over into the real world in today’s politics, I never would have written about them.”
That wouldn’t have changed much of his practice, however. For the past three decades, Condo has been creating abstract and figurative canvases, sculptures and drawings of a very distinctive style. A crossover between “old masters and Looney Tunes,” as they’ve been described, his works walk the thin line between distorted appropriation and make-believe.
They riff on the painters he loves—Picasso, Rembrandt, Degas—while presenting the artist’s own grotesque, sometimes delirious, always wildly imaginative take on the absurdities of everyday life. “Fake paintings” is the perfect description for them—unfortunate and accidental fake-news association aside.
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“Aggression and dividedness in the world cannot destroy the human spirit—art speaks louder than words sometimes.”