This biography from the Archives of AskART:
|  In the 1980's, George Condo, born in Concord, New Hampshire, arrived in
New York, after having been in California, and became close friends
with members of Andy Warhol's Factory including Julian Schnabel,
Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He collaborated with the
heroes of the Beat Generation, William S. Burroughs and Allen
Ginsberg. Of this time, it was written: "His work was governed by
the reworking of the Old Masters, in a lyric universe in which the
human being is decomposed in a multiplicity of non-human beings merged
from his own unconsciousness: 'I conceive artistic language as my own
natural reactions, a combination of rational and irrational.' "
(denoirmont)
He worked together successfully with Burroughs,
which included a visit to Burroughs in Lawrence, Kansas. Condo
said: "We both disintegrated in each other's presence and became
a third
being." However, each retained their individuality as well with Condo
contributing a cartoon aspect to their conceptual sculpture of layered
images.
Though his work, qualified as a "figurative
abstraction", it is quite impossible to determinate a frontier between
representation and abstraction, between academic art and avant-garde,
between popular imagery and High Art. His female figures are
described as ferocious and highly aggressive types and are intended to
dispel any sense of submissiveness or timidity.
Condo, who remains known primarily for his cartoon-like portraits has also turned to
sculpture with works that include jazz themes---monumental stainless steel
letters spelling out the names of music legends like Miles Davis and
Charlie Parker. His sculptural works also include abstract bronzes and
32 busts of invented deities, a group of works inspired by the 9-11
terrorist attacks.
George
Condo was raised in a family where the father was a math and physics
professor. For two years, he attended the University of
Massachusetts at Lowell, where his father taught, and taking art
history classes, became very enamored with Caravaggio and other Old
Masters. He later did paintings that he called fake Old Masters,
which had elements of abstraction and unique treatment that got the
attention of younger artists. While in college, he also played
bass guitar with a punk rock group called the Girls, and
landed in New York City because of a music "gig".
However,
in 1981,
he moved to Los Angeles, and became friends with Roger Herman, a local
artist. Herman's influence led to gallery representation and some
sales, but by the mid 1980s, Condo was back in New York, the place he
perceived as the center of action, and was offered
gallery shows. From that time, his career has been a success
underscored by special recognition such as receiving in 1999 the
Academy Award in
Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; the release in 2000
of a feature
film titled Condo Paintings, directed by John McNaughton; and a visiting lectureship at Harvard University.
He
also has stirred big-time controversy such as in England in 2006, when
he entered a portrait painting of Queen Elizabeth in his
attention-getting 'laugh-out-loud' style at the Tate Modern in
London. He titled the work, Cabbage Patch Queen, "after
the cutely homely kids' doll", and "the reaction was nuclear. . .
. Royal Academy members were furious". From that event, he had a
lot of fall out, but is still convinced that "Noble subjects can be
painted in a jocular manner with no loss of dignity to the sitter."
(Plagens, 185)
Condo has work is in permanent collections of
major museums worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York;
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York; The Ludwig Museum, Cologne; etc.
He is married to
Italian actress, Anna Condo, and they have two children. Although
he is not fond of travel, they did live in Cologne from 1983 to 1984,
and Paris from 1984 to 1985. The family lives on the upper East
Side of New York City, which he likes because "there are no other
artists around." (Plagens, 183)
Written by Lonnie Pierson Dunbier
Sources:
http://www.denoirmont.com/artistes/condogb.html
Art Forum, November 1994
Art & Auction, September 2003
Peter Plagens, "Fake Tiepolos and the Cabbage Patch Queen", ARTnews, Summer 2007, p. 183
|
Biography from Rogallery.com:
| | George Condo is as well known for his painterly portraits as he is for
the bizarre cast of archetypal characters that inhabit them. His
subjects are classically posed, dramatically lit, and surrounded by
conflated fragments from the history of painting, such as bubbles,
glass bottles, drapery, vegetables lifted from the still-life table,
and vague empty settings to better project the subject of the picture.
In the end, however, the entire world and inner life of his subjects
derive completely from his imagination. |
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