Viewing Room | George Condo. Reclining Woman in Field, 2008

'People might say that one of my paintings looks like Guston meets Monet in a Picasso format in Cezanne’s world, but ultimately, I consider it to be just about the knowledge of painting. You want to reach a point where your work is the sum total of everything that ever happened before you. That’s basically my goal, that my art would be the sum total of every other form of art in the universe.'

– George Condo

George Condo. Reclining Woman in Field, 2008 (drawing) © Gary Tatintsian Gallery

Emerging out of the dynamism of the early 1980s New York art scene, Condo developed a unique and provocative painting style, with his self-styled "fake old masters" borrowing the virtuoso draftsmanship and paint handling of the Old Masters to depict the fantastical subjects of Condo’s imagination.

Fusing together fragments of art history, Condo’s paintings forthrightly marry elements of the sensational and the shocking, galvanizing a mental shock that disconnects the grasps of reality on human perception.

“What’s possible with painting that’s not in real life is you can see two or three sides of a personality at the same time, and you can capture what I call a psychological cubism.”

— George Condo