George Condo at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam)

George Condo: Mental States
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
25 June – 25 September 2011

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has a unique collection of works by the Surrealists, including masterpieces by Dalí and Magritte. The work of George Condo (1957) has a surreal quality that complements this collection. The selection of works charts the artist’s development from 1983 to the present day. His paintings and sculptures explore the genre of portraiture, the human physiognomy and various ‘states of mind’.

Along with painters such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, Condo was instrumental in the international revival of painting in the 1980s. His astonishing technical ability, stylistic versatility and inventive subject matter has been deeply influential to two generations of American and European painters.

Mental states
Additionally the exhibition features a selection of paintings from various moments in Condo’s career, portraying lonely and marginalized figures as well as scenes of manic decadence.
There are also a grouping of large-scale paintings created over the last thirty years which plays with the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. For Condo, these paintings also depict a mental state – that of the artist. Condo recently stated: ‘Representational pictures are the artist’s body – abstractions are pictures of the artist’s mind.’