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Descriptif du lot
Intricately shaded in pastel, aquarelle pencil and ink, George Condo’s Out of Time and In Space (2020) offers a snapshot of a fantastical world. Condo has drawn an assembly of four figures whose bodies and faces merge and fragment across the picture plane, enlivened with splashes, washes, sweeping locks of hair, cross-hatched shadows and rays and facets of bright colour. With their mouths agape and wide, jewel-like eyes, it is as if they are all speaking at once, a sense underscored by the vivid hues which animate the exchange. Executed in June 2020 at the height of the Coronavirus pandemic, Out of Time and In Space depicts the type of social interaction—an in-person gathering—that had, by that point, become forbidden, and even the title suggests that this meeting occurred somewhere outside reality.
Condo draws constantly, consistently, and with unbridled enthusiasm, both as preparation for paintings and as an autonomous act unto itself. His skilled draughtsmanship won him early attention as an emerging artist, particularly with his 1984-1986 series of Expanding Canvases, for which he would begin in the centre of the painting and draw outwards in a single sitting. He sees drawing and painting as complementary, a relationship further underscored in his Drawing Paintings, initiated around 2008, which united the two mediums within a single canvas. For Condo—whose retrospective earlier this year at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris featured 110 drawings—the graphic and painterly have always been twin poles of his practice, with each offering a different means to articulate his overarching interests.
Formally, Out of Time and In Space is almost puzzle-like in its configuration, as if multiple drawings have been snipped up, shuffled, and reconfigured across the page. This suggestion of temporal and physical flux is no accident: Condo’s practice is a riotous blend of art-historical styles from which he appropriates and reimagines various motifs. ‘I describe what I do,’ he has said, ‘as psychological cubism. Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states’ (quoted in S. Jeffries, ‘George Condo: “I was delirious. Nearly died”’, The Guardian, 10 February 2014). Picasso is but one important historical touchstone, and like his Modernist predecessor’s portraits, Condo’s figures in Out of Time and In Space remain recognisably human despite their abstraction. The drawing’s negative space balances each carefully constructed visage, holding them together in their off-kilter world.
Condo draws constantly, consistently, and with unbridled enthusiasm, both as preparation for paintings and as an autonomous act unto itself. His skilled draughtsmanship won him early attention as an emerging artist, particularly with his 1984-1986 series of Expanding Canvases, for which he would begin in the centre of the painting and draw outwards in a single sitting. He sees drawing and painting as complementary, a relationship further underscored in his Drawing Paintings, initiated around 2008, which united the two mediums within a single canvas. For Condo—whose retrospective earlier this year at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris featured 110 drawings—the graphic and painterly have always been twin poles of his practice, with each offering a different means to articulate his overarching interests.
Formally, Out of Time and In Space is almost puzzle-like in its configuration, as if multiple drawings have been snipped up, shuffled, and reconfigured across the page. This suggestion of temporal and physical flux is no accident: Condo’s practice is a riotous blend of art-historical styles from which he appropriates and reimagines various motifs. ‘I describe what I do,’ he has said, ‘as psychological cubism. Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states’ (quoted in S. Jeffries, ‘George Condo: “I was delirious. Nearly died”’, The Guardian, 10 February 2014). Picasso is but one important historical touchstone, and like his Modernist predecessor’s portraits, Condo’s figures in Out of Time and In Space remain recognisably human despite their abstraction. The drawing’s negative space balances each carefully constructed visage, holding them together in their off-kilter world.