George Condo

Published on the occasion of the museum exhibition George Condo: The Way I Think at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C, this extensive catalogue features over 200 full plate images and details of George Condo's drawings, sketches and paintings. The catalogue also features an essay, Becoming Condo by Klaus Ottman, Deputy Director for Curatorial and Academic Affairs at The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C.

George Condo: The Way I Think is the first major survey of drawings by the George Condo, 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, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Manet, Picasso, and Guston. Working in New York and Paris, Condo has occupied a prominent role in painting for the last three decades. The exhibition will travel to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark. in Fall 2017.

George Condo has long challenged in his work the primacy of painting over drawing. He has never considered painting as fulfillment of his drawing’s promise. He recently said that he wants to “stand up for drawing.” It is in his drawings that his process of “painting memory” (the title of a course he taught at Harvard University), on relying on the mind and the imagination to take a “snapshot” rather than photogenic material, of splitting his imaginary subjects into a kind of “psychological cubism,” and of allowing figurative compositions to be “infested” with abstraction becomes most undisguised.