Mental States
Major exhibition catalog surveying George Condo's career from 1982 to 2011, published for his landmark touring retrospective at New Museum (New York), Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam), Hayward Gallery (London), and Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt) in 2011-2012. This comprehensive 168-page volume focuses on Condo's portrait paintings while including sculptural busts in materials including gold and bronze. Organized thematically with 125 color illustrations, the book explores Condo's engagement with art history, popular culture, and contemporary society through essays by Ralph Rugoff (New Museum Director), Laura Hoptman (MoMA curator), novelist Will Self, and fiction writer David Means.
George Condo (b. 1957) pioneered "Psychological Cubism," his term for representing multiple emotional and psychological states simultaneously within single figures—a departure from classical Cubism's spatial fragmentation. Emerging from New York's 1980s East Village scene alongside Basquiat and Haring, Condo developed "Artificial Realism," synthesizing Old Master techniques with pop sensibility and cartoon aesthetics. His distorted portraits with bulbous faces, multiple eyes, and fractured features authentically depict what he calls "the disjointed human psyche"—the emotional complexity and psychological contradictions of modern existence rendered through virtuoso painting combined with deliberately crude passages.
The "Mental States" exhibition and catalog examine Condo's systematic investigation of psychological portraiture across three decades. His subjects—whether based on observation or pure invention—exist in states of psychological flux, their features rearranged to express simultaneous, contradictory emotions. This approach extends to his sculptural busts in gold and bronze, which translate his painted distortions into three-dimensional form. The works engage art historical precedents from Velázquez and Goya through Picasso and de Kooning, while incorporating references from American popular culture, advertising, and cartoons to create what Condo terms "composites of the imagination."
Published by Hayward Gallery Publishing and distributed by D.A.P. in North America. Hardcover format, 11 × 11.75 inches, 168 pages with 125 color illustrations. Contributors: Ralph Rugoff, Laura Hoptman, Will Self, David Means. Condo's work is held in major collections including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum, Whitney Museum, Louisiana Museum, Guggenheim, Tate, Centre Pompidou, and The Broad. This catalog represents the most significant survey of Condo's psychological portraiture from the early 1980s through 2011.
