Beschreibung:

Property from a Distinguished Private Collection George Condo Follow Nude Homeless Drinker signed, titled and dated "Condo 99 Nude Homeless Drinker" on the reverse oil on canvas 65 x 72 in. (165.1 x 182.9 cm.) Painted in 1999.
Provenance Skarstedt Gallery, New York Acquired from the above by the present owner Exhibited New York, New Museum; Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen; London, Hayward Gallery; Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle, George Condo Mental States , January 26, 2011 – May 28, 2012, pp. 117, 168 (illustrated, p. 117) Literature Ralph Rugoff, The Imaginary Portraits of George Condo , New York, 2002, p. 120 (illustrated) Mark Brown, “George Condo retrospective opens at the Hayward Gallery”, The Guardian , October 17, 2011, online Simon Baker, George Condo Painting Reconfigured , London, 2015, no. 211, pp. 198-199 (illustrated, p. 199) Catalogue Essay “Picasso was always painting Dora Maar or whoever, Bacon’s portraits could always be traced to some existing person. But not my portraits. They were all imaginary.” George Condo At once visually arresting and amusingly alarming, Nude Homeless Drinker from 1999 is a striking example of George Condo’s manifest interest in picturing psychological disturbance, painted in his unique pictorial language that forces viewers to ponder the surreal state of our own humanity. Since as early as the 1980’s when Condo first joined the booming New York art scene, he has been widely considered an “artist’s artist”, recontextualizing the works of Old and Modern Masters from Ingres and Velázquez to Picasso and Matisse, all while continuing to influence and astonish younger generations of painters such as John Currin Glenn Brown and Nicole Eisenman Ultimately, Condo’s incredible imagination and his remarkable ability to portray the whole spectrum of human emotions are what has made him an icon of twentieth and twenty-first century painting. Rendered in brilliant unexpected colors and sensitive brushstrokes, Nude Homeless Drinker is a zany portrait that perfectly encapsulates what are endearingly referred to as Condo’s “unedited human disasters”. In the mid-1990s, Condo began to develop a new facial vocabulary in his portraits with bulbous cheeks, bulging eyes and disk-like ears, all discernible in the present work. These particular features convey a compelling psychological presence, often immediately recognizable as somehow manic or depressive. Condo refers to these paintings as “antipodal portraits”, renderings of figures on the outskirts of society or in everyday roles, hovering between reality and fantasy. These figures are regularly accompanied by recurring referential symbols, such as bubbles, wine bottles or glasses, cigarettes, and carrots. The idyllic blue sky background, whimsical bubble and wine bottle of the present work are also evident in some of Condo’s other depictions of determined drinkers, such as The Drinker (1997) and Uncle Joe (2005), a scene of the ultimate hedonist in a peaceful green beyond the reaches of society, aggressive in his inebriation. The present work was included in Condo’s first major survey exhibition, George Condo Mental States (2011-2012), which travelled to important institutions including the New Museum, New York and the Hayward Gallery, London. Arranged thematically rather than chronologically, the show displayed the breadth and diversity of the artist’s impressive oeuvre with works spanning his entire career. Nude Homeless Drinker is a captivating and humorous example of the theme “Manic Society”, a grouping of paintings from the late 1990s and 2000s depicting drunken exhibitionism and figures in the throes of manic delight and unhinged desperation or rage. The teeth-bearing grins or screams of many of these figures recall de Kooning’s ferociously smiling, abstracted women, such as Woman I (1950-1952), who parallel Condo’s own female forms, transformed into relevant, contemporary images. As scholar Simon Baker described: “ Nude Homeless Drinker usher[ed] in a range of variously outraged and outrageous female forms. While in other work, stock poses from the life room are turned on their heads: the sense of the female form prey to the vicissitudes and arbitrary geo