George Condo

GEORGE CONDO (Concord, New Hampshire, 1957).
"The insane clown," 2019.
Etching and drypoint on paper. Exemplar 13/30.
Published and edited by Tate (London).
Printed by Burnet Editions (New York).
Presents dry stamp of the printer.
Signed and dated in pencil in the lower right corner. Justified in pencil in the lower left corner.
Provenance. Tate Gallery.
Measurements: 45.5 x 40 cm (print); 57.3 x 50.5 cm (paper).
In this work the artist depicts the fractured and distorted face and torso of a clown, a motif that Condo has returned to several times in his work - with a goofy grin, cartoonish googly eyes and a comic grimace. Condo made The Mad Clown following an invitation to create a limited edition print in support of Tate in association with Tate Editions. It was printed by Greg Burnet of Burnet Editions, New York, in an edition of thirty plus ten artist's proofs and one printer's proof. Condo has long presented his audiences with bizarre and grotesque characters, drawn from various historical and contemporary genres as well as imaginative speculation. This approach was aided by his exploration of the science of physiognomics as it was understood in Renaissance Italy, facilitated by his discovery of a 1994 text by art historian Michael Kwakkelstein, Leonardo Da Vinci as a Physiognomist.

George Condo studied art history at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell. For some time he practiced guitar and music composition while his interest in drawing and painting grew. He formed a proto-synth/punk group called "The Girls" with abstract painter Mark Dagley, avant-garde musician Daved Hild and Robin Amos, founder of Cul de Sac. In 1979 he met Jean Michel Basquiat when his group opened for his band "Gray" at the Tier 3 venue. After this encounter, Condo moved to Ludlow street in New York to continue his career as an artist and in the early 1980's he emerged on the art scene in the East Village, Manhattan. Condo coined the term Artificial Realism to define his style, the realistic representation of what is artificial, a hybrid between the traditional work of the European masters and the American Pop Art sensibility. Condo, along with Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, was one of the pioneers in the international revival of painting since 1980. While in Europe, Condo met Burroughs and they collaborated on numerous paintings and sculptures between 1988 and 1996. Several of their works were selected for exhibition in 1997 at the Pat Heam Gallery in New York. They also worked together on a collection of writings and prints called "Ghost of Chance," which were published by the Whitney Museum in 1991. Condo's work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, New York, the Whitney Museum, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo, New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D. C, and the Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, and in other American and European museums and public collections.

COMMENTS

This lot can be seen at the Setdart Madrid Gallery located at C/Velázquez, 7.