George Condo - Drawings - Sprüth Magers - London

through November 12th 2011

George Condo emerged out of the dynamism of the New York art scene of the early 1980s, swiftly establishing himself as an unparalleled draftsman with an at once distinctive and arresting painterly style. Condo travelled to Europe where he associated with the Mülheimer Freiheit cohort of Cologne, a collective of so-called ‘Young Wild Ones’, with Walter Dahn and Jiri Georg Dokoupil being amongst the most influential painters on Condo. In 1984, Monika Sprüth Galerie in Cologne was the first European gallery to show Condo’s work and over the past three decades Condo has continued to show in more than thirty exhibitions at Sprüth Magers. Condo’s formative European travels eventually brought him to Paris where he remained until 1995. It was from his encounters with European painting that Condo embarked upon a series of ‘fake Old Master’ portraits that rampaged through the archives of art history, harnessing the pictorial languages of Velázquez, Rembrandt, Goya and Picasso.

more