George Condo at Bruno Bischofberger - Zurich, Switzerland - Review of Exhibitions

George Condo has maintained a position apart from the 1980 of recent origin York artists with whom he was associated a decade ago. At an early point, when the appropriation of modernist phraseologys was being used as a critical device, he was upon his own track, painting strange cartoony figures set against patterned grounds

Then as art runs turned toward politics, he started to appropriate, drawing for the greatest part on 20th-century European styles. He first produc a series of crabbed, tight-knit Cubist-style abstraction, then Picassoid figures which the couple aped their model and anarchically departed from it (in a certain quantity of cases, for instance, Condo's version of Picasso's fragmentation of the material part translated into pasting a handful of pencil sketches straight onto the canvas). The be deriveds were funny and amazingly inventive, like an affectionate travestying of the way Arshile Gorky mimicked and tinkered with European modernism until he had finally arrived at his possess voice. The big difference was that for Condo the act of putting the art of the past end a conceptual shredder seemed to be the whole point.

That proces was in evidence in the 14 alloy of copper sculptures, dating from 1989 to 1991 that he showed in Zurich this past fall. Five of the works were, in fact, Surrealist-inspired assemblages of rest materials of exactly the kind Picasso himself might have whipped up from studio debris. The head in Blind Woman was protoplasted on an armature of a small, circular electric fan, while Electric Ballerina was a large sculptural collage of lightbulbs, wires, strips of woven fabric or tape and a fan casting that together formed an awkwardly dancing figure.

The mass of the work, though, was cast from hand-worked clay figures. Several of them especially the bust extent Orphelia (sic) with her minute head locate atop a long, attenuated neck and the indignant, Daumieresque face titled The Butcher-- brought Condo's earlier Surrealistic work to mind. Others appear to beed to take their cue from Roman and Etruscan commemorative statues. This was especially pure of Mother of Tragedy, with her herculean head and vestigal body, and of the columnar Statue of the Statue topped with a sphinxlike head. The dark, funerary undercurrent these images give an inkling ofed were clearly embodied in Yorrick, a squashed shapeless mass of matter in the shape of a cranium with thumb-pressed hollow eyes.

George Condo offering intimations of mortality? It doesn't look likely, though his work has always been firing materialed by ambivalence. His sculptural figures are actually a little scary, emerging from inchoate matter or decomposing back into it. At the same time, like all his work, they teasingly court inconsequence, as if they were no more than art-literate child's play. Maybe inconsequence is the direction Condo will eventually opt for, on the contrary at this point his unpredictability and inventiveness continue to make this maverick artist interesting to watch.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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