George Condo exhibition at the Hayward

I paid a visit to the George Condo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery last Sunday, the day it closed. On display were paintings and sculptures from the last 28 years of Condo’s career.

When you walk up the stairs into the exhibition, you are greeted with a collection of golden busts. These busts make three-dimensional the twisted characters appearing in Condo’s famous paintings, and introduce the visitor to what lies ahead in the exhibition.

My favorite bust of the exhibition, though not a part of the collection of golden busts I mentioned, was “The Lunatic”.

This bust manages to blend comedy and tragedy, beauty and ugliness. Its complicated texture and shadows add to the lunacy of the sculpture.

After the golden busts, at the very end of the corridor wait nine portraits of the Queen, entitled “Dreams and Nightmares of the Queen”. This controversial piece mutates the Queen, shrinking her head, removing an eye or distorting her nose. Although some critics may be enraged by Condo’s deformation of the Queen, in my opinion, these portraits are good-natured and just poking fun. For Condo, no one, from a Priest to the Virgin Mary to the Queen, is out of bounds, and perhaps his deformation of important figures is an act of social leveling.

Further on, a massive wall in the exhibition is covered from floor to ceiling with Condo’s portraits.

Condo takes imaginary cartoon characters and gives them the gravitas of old master’s portraits. This display style contrasts Condo’s work to traditional portraits, highlighting the absurdity of his paintings. As well as this, it also picks up on his inspiration from and his references to some of the old masters, as his unique and imaginative approach combines something of Picasso, De Kooning, Goya and Francis Bacon in the style of Mickey Mouse. Condo’s references to Picasso become most evident not only in his piece “Memories of Picasso”, but also in “Spanish Head Composition”. Personally, I feel that in these two paintings, his reference to Picasso might be too strong, as he is forcing his work to be compared directly with Picasso’s, and his pieces do not compare. Instead, I prefer the portraits which stick to Condo’s own style and his original imagination. For example, one of my favorite portraits on display was “Red Antipodular Portrait”, featuring a despairing, hairy cartoon character.

Another room featured what Condo named “expanding canvases”. Appropriately named, these pieces appear to expand from a center point and seem like they could go on forever, only confined by the size of the canvas. These pieces are

some of my favorite. As you can see in the piece “Internal Space”, the overlapping shapes make for confusion and chaos from afar, yet from up-close, we can decipher the different forms making up the paintings.

Overall, I thought the Condo show was  a good one. Through the chaos and humor of his paintings, Condo manages to portray the emotion of his subject: their mental state. The exhibition certainly left me smiling on a cold London afternoon.