The Musée Maillol presents an exhibition devoted to George Condo from April to August 2009. Condo is a significant New York artist who makes work inspired by the history of western painting. After working with Andy Warhol at the Factory, George Condo went on to establish himself as one of the leading artists in the generation that saw the emergence of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Well known in the New York scene, Condo collaborated with the famous writer William S. Burroughs and the poet Allan Ginsberg on a film: Condo Painting by John Mac Laughton.

George Condo’s works are immersed in the history of art; each canvases correspond with a pre-existing painting. Manet, Picasso, Francis Bacon, Dali or Velázquez are a few of the artists who inspire Condo’s paintings. A self proclaimed hybrid artist who has assimilated European heritage from an American perspective, Condo draws on this dialogue to shed light on the use of bodies and space in his work. Condo paints vanitas, still lifes, portraits and provocatively erotic nudes, “a whole collection of things”, he says.

A child of Pop Art, Condo claims a borrowed artistic style that provokes a feeling of ‘déjà vu’ and ‘already painted’. “My works evoke Picasso, Matta, the Flemish painters and their Spanish cousins Goya and Velázquez, as well as everything that the Museum of Television has shown me since I was a child.” He describes his art as “artificial realism”, and seeks to offer a believable reproduction of an artificial world. He has, for example, visually borrowed his favorite cartoon character Big Red, who is featured in his work but recontextualized to resemble a Rembrandt. Félix Guattari said of him: “In short, you reinvent modern art, rather than denying it on a massive scale. Through your unconscious “passage à l’acte”, you demonstrate that painting, as a production of subjectivity, is still and always possible, provided that it is taken up again in its nascent state.

The exhibition will feature recent works made within the last two years, including oils on canvas, important drawings and sculptures.