George Condo Paperback by Simon Baker

Product Details

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson (2022-05-10)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 296 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780500296493
• Item Weight: 1990.17 grams
• Dimensions: 12.25 x 10.31 x 1.02 cm

The definitive monograph of the outrageous, unorthodox New York painter George Condo

With his arresting, unsettling style, George Condo emerged from the dynamism of the New York art scene in the early 1980s, and he has been restlessly painting, drawing, and sculpting—bringing forms into the world in one way or another—ever since. Reliably inconsistent, Condo’s references and inspirations, in both style and content, ricochet deliriously around the canon of Western art history. Somewhere between his fake Tiepolos, reconfigured Manets, impossibly intricate paintings that seem to be abstract until you get up close, and his perpetually screaming cubist hags, Condo has invented, mastered, and expanded not just one painterly language but the whole lexicon.

Working closely with the artist, writer and art historian Simon Baker has combined biographical, chronological, and thematic approaches to survey George Condo’s work and career to date. An introductory essay on Condo’s contradictory nature and a chapter exploring his early career are followed by three thematic chapters that look at the years from 1980s to the present, tracing Condo’s different systematic approaches to the language of painting, exploring his relationship to the concept of abstraction, and probing the darker side of his psychological iconography.

About the Author

George Condo was born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957 and studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. He as occupied a prominent position in the art world for more than thirty years. His work is in the permanent collections of The Broad Art Foundation, Santa Monica; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; among others. Condo is represented by Skarstedt Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, Berlin.

Simon Baker is director of Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris (MEP). He was formerly senior curator, photography and international art, Tate. Prior to becoming Tate’s first curator of photography, he was an associate professor of art history at the University of Nottingham. He has written widely on surrealism, photography, and contemporary art.