The Way I think George Condo
The Phillips presents a survey of drawings and paintings by George Condo (b. 1957, Concord, New Hampshire), a prolific painter whose career spans three decades and is best known for his rich pictorial inventions, existential humor, and imaginative portraits that incorporate a hybridization of art-historical influences, such as Goya, Velázquez, Manet, Picasso, and Guston.
Working in New York and Paris, Condo has long challenged the primacy of painting over drawing. He has never considered painting as fulfillment of his drawing's promise. It is in his drawings that his process of “painting memory” (the title of a course he taught at Harvard University) becomes most undisguised—where he relies on the mind and the imagination to take a “snapshot” rather than photographic material, splits his imaginary subjects into a kind of “psychological cubism,” and allows figurative compositions to be “infested” with abstraction.
This exhibition of more than 200 drawings.