King of Weird

eorge condo wishes he could return to 1988, when he wrote Notes on Artificial Realism, a treatise describing his artistic direction. In it, the American artist 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 would never 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 have been described, his works walk the thin line between distorted appropriation and makebelieve. 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. The current sociopolitical situation might even be fertile material for the artist. Last April, a large portion of his New York solo exhibition at the Skarstedt Gallery touched upon it, with a series of politically charged oil paintings influenced by “trolls, bots, and political figures”. The show he is bringing to the Maritime Museum in Hong Kong this month—his Asian debut—is similarly inspired. Organised by Skarstedt and Berlin-based Sprüth Magers, it is titled George Condo: Expanded Portrait Compositions, and presents a new body of site-specific paintings and works on paper that “tell the story of our states of mind in this ever-anxiety-ridden moment”, Condo says. “But it ultimately also expresses that aggression and dividedness in the world cannot destroy the human spirit—that art speaks louder than words sometimes.” And can push, I suggest, a “rebellion” of sorts. “Having a mutant as president has created such a hostile environment that it only makes you stronger and more determined to show the world what you think about it,” he concedes. Condo’s work has had a disruptive nature since he began producing art in the early 1980s.

George Condo Marianna Cerini