George Condo (b. 1957)

'I describe what I do as psychological cubism. Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states. Four of them can occur simultaneously. Like glimpsing a bus with one passenger howling over a joke they're hearing down the phone, someone else asleep, someone else crying – I'll put them all in one face' G. Condo.

An insight into the artist’s uncanny, unmistakable style of portraiture, George Condo’s Blue Nude Study from 2006 is a drawing at once unsettling and enchanting. Demonstrating a considered, literate engagement with art history, as well as the artist’s skill as a draughtsman, Blue Nude Study is shot through with a disquieting modernist erotica, referencing the nudes of Modigliani, Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignan and Matisse’s own Blue Nude. Tapping into the strange sensual energy of those works, the painter applies his cartoonish figurative style to his subject, her face defined by signature bulbous protrusions and bared teeth; she is transformed into a unique, distinctively Condo-esque vision that examines the legacy of these grandees of twentieth-century painting – whose works, once seen as affronts to taste and beauty, have become aesthetic exemplars of Western civilization. Condo’s work likewise destroys and recasts aesthetic categories, smashing together high and low culture in a reflection on the way in which beauty erodes and mutates. ‘With me,’ he says, ‘it is a constant fluctuation in regard to beauty. Is beauty a stylized version of the ugly?’ (G. Condo, quoted in T. Kellein, ‘Interview with George Condo, New York, 15 April 2004’ in George Condo: One Hundred Women, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Bielefeld, 2005, p. 37).