ROTTERDAM.- This summer Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen presents a major retrospective exhibition of the American artist George Condo. His work is known for its adventurous, imaginative and provocative character. The exhibition features more than sixty paintings and sculptures by this influential artist.

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.

Contemporary Surrealism
More than thirty paintings with a variety of styles and subjects are presented in a salon-style hanging at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen. Featuring a range of fantasy characters, these portraits often incorporate elements from masterpieces by artists including Velasquez and Picasso, such as ‘Memories of Picasso’ (1989). The characters are recognisable archetypes - butlers, businessmen, saints and other historical figures - familiar despite their humorously grotesque features, such as ‘Nude Homeless Drinker’ (1999). The characters in Condo’s paintings are both comic and tragic. This group of portraits is complemented with a series of sixteen sculptures in gilded bronze.

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.’

George Condo
American artist George Condo was born in New Hampshire. He has occupied a prominent position in the art world for nearly three decades. Condo studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Condo’s work has been exhibited only once before in the Netherlands: in 1985 at Galerie ’t Venster in Rotterdam. He has exhibited extensively in the United States and Europe. His work is included in the collections of museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo.