George Condo
Purple Compression
Purple Compression
Price available upon request
2011
Acrylic, charcoal, and pastel on linen
188 x 228.6 cm / 74 x 90 in
196.2 x 236.9 x 8.9 cm / 77 ¼ x 93 ¼ x 3 ½ in (framed)
A seminal work, ‘Purple Compression’ (2011) encapsulates the radical originality of George Condo’s ‘Drawing Paintings’, which the artist began in 2008. The series seductively hovers between different media, genres, and ostensibly opposite processes. The engaging body of work—with examples held in important collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris—has been lauded as ‘Condo’s primary and most vital invention’ by Simon Baker, the author of the artist’s highly regarded monograph. [1]
Set against a lilac purple backdrop, a group of cartoon-like faces burst from the horizontal center of the canvas as if energetically elbowing their way out of the composition. Their sketchily rendered arms and legs are almost indistinguishable from the looping gestural lines from which they are drawn. Populated by archetypal figures from the artist’s hallmark cast of characters, the extraordinary work presents a collision of abstraction and figuration.
‘Purple Compression’ harnesses Condo’s affinity for drawing, which constitutes a rich strand of his creative practice. The artist’s unique approach to artmaking allows him to investigate the immediacy and improvisation of gesture through line while working at various speeds and rhythms—a process he compares to jazz music, in which there is a basic order but also the capacity for experimentation and spontaneity.
The monumental work reveals Condo’s extraordinary imagination and compositional skill. Condo makes each ‘Drawing Painting’ by following a similar process: after painting blocks of color, the artist superimposes a series of interlocking forms and figures in charcoal, some of which are then filled in with paint. Layering and blending the charcoal lines and blocks of color, Condo adds brightly pigmented pastels, intuitively adding to his original composition until an increasingly detailed and complex picture emerges. This heightened sense of equality between drawing, painting, and pastel and charcoal, which have historically inhabited different positions, is a significant and original characteristic of his ‘Drawing Paintings.’
Since the beginning of his career, Condo has drawn from a wealth of sources spanning the renaissance and baroque, to surrealism and cubism, through to the influences of contemporary comics and cartoons. Assimilating these various influences to create a psychological form of painting, Condo produces works that simultaneously allude to and evade categorization. The result are paintings that are at once strange and familiar, experimental and timeless, and above all, distinctively unique. ‘Purple Compression’ exemplifies Condo’s heterogeneous influences and distinct visual language, revealing the artist’s ability to ‘dismantle one reality and construct another from the same parts.’ [2]
About the artist
Currently living and working in New York City, George Condo was born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957 and studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Starting in the early 1980s, Condo began painting and soon developed a distinct pictorial vocabulary that examines the formal languages of realism and abstraction, collapsing different work processes and genres. His experimental oeuvre surveys the legacy of canonical artists, reimagining their diverse innovations in his own style while challenging traditional conceptions of portraiture.
Artwork images © George Condo
Portrait © George Condo. Photo: Michael Avedon
1.) Simon Baker, ‘George Condo. Painting Reconfigured,’ London/UK: Thames & Hudson, 2015, p. 152.
2.) George Condo quoted in ‘George Condo. Painting Reconfigured,’ p. 55.