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Sometimes it’s time to change things up!

Fri 01 Oct 2021    
EcoBalance
| 2 min read

George Condo’s art is worth millions, but he is set on ‘eliminating’ his signature style.

Though Condo’s practice has long been entwined with music, this intuitive way of working marked a significant departure for the artist, who typically approaches his paintings more like drawings. Condo, now 63 years old, has become famous for his distinctive way of rendering the human form into something recognizable but altogether uneasy, a taxonomy ranging from the cartoonish to the surrealistic.

But letting a mercurial force guide his hands, he began riding his compositions of the recurring characters who haunted them over the years.

More than four decades into his career, deconstructing his own work is the only next step that makes sense to Condo. Like decomposing matter that nurtures new growth, he hopes that breaking down his paintings will elevate them.

“I think that eliminating my own style, and my own recognizable imagery is probably the most important thing that I could do at this point in my life,” he explained.

Condo’s new works signal a return to basics, but that doesn’t mean they are devoid of meaning or context. They respond to his experiences of the past year and a half experiences that, for many of us, will be all too familiar.

Some of Condo’s new works respond to our collective experiences during the pandemic.

“There was that moment… when, all of a sudden, it was like we’ve all been let out of our cages, and we can go out and do whatever we want,” he said. “The paintings were a celebration of that freedom.”

Elsewhere, his “Blues” paintings, of abstracted black and white figures over swaths of blue, conveyed his unease with leaving an extended period of isolation.

His recent “Blues” paintings contend with how to re-enter the world after prolonged isolation.

“The ‘Blues’ paintings were this strange lamentation of having trained myself for a year to live in solitude re-entering the real world,” he said. “In my mind, I was trying to keep together a body of work, but I thought, ‘I don’t care about (making a) body of work anymore; what I care about is pure expression. And I care about empathetically expressing those feelings that maybe everybody has. We all feel this pressure, and we need to release from that pressure,'” he said. 

And if his new work doesn’t look much “like a George Condo,” he added, that “might be a good thing.” He, like us, is never quite sure of what’s coming next.

“I just wonder what those (next paintings) are going to look like. I don’t know what they’re gonna look like. And so that’s what’s exciting,” he said.

Source: Agencies


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