If the name George Condo doesn’t ring a bell, his artwork, which graced the cover of Kanye West’s No. 1 album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, certainly will.
The artist’s depiction of a black-dressed ballerina, holding a wine glass—whose face seems to be frozen in red-cheeked horror at something off-canvas—was actually West’s second choice for the 2010 hip-hop album. His first pictured a naked African-American man, bottle in hand, straddled by an armless, naked, white, winged phoenix—something that some retail music chains at the time didn’t take too kindly to. Condo ended up producing five alternate covers, one of which West uses as his Twitter avatar.
Like his controversially inclined former client, the contemporary American artist’s work has an eye for the grotesque (think Goya’s “Saturn Eating His Son”) and the Cubism of Picasso (see: his series of women in armchairs). His figures have a particularly animalistic quality to their faces—similar, maybe, to a rabid or vicious dog; or a Kubrickian film character.
Born in 1957 in New Hampshire, Condo went to school for art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts (Lowell); and later worked in Andy Warhol’s Factory, where he befriended other contemporary American stalwarts like Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Clearly, his famous friends’ styles rubbed off on him.
One of the artist’s works, which he calls “Psychological Cubism,” will be up for sale in Sotheby’s Nov. 17 “Contemporary Art Evening” auction. Notes Sotheby’s on its website, Woman on Brown Chair (see below) “… captures an unsettling moment of mental chaos, when the subject’s contradictory emotions are visible all at once.” Painted in 2007, the work is part of The Steven and Ann Ames Collection, which is collectively valued in excess of $100 million. Condo’s Woman has a pre-auction estimate of $500,000–$700,000.
For more information on the piece, click here. To browse the rest of the lots, click here. To get a peek inside Condo’s mind, watch the video above, which features an extensive interview with the artist.
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