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Lot Essay
Painted in 2010, Mr Twiddle is a vibrant work from George Condo’s series of ‘Cartoon Abstractions’, which feature figures from mid-century Looney Tunes, Hanna-Barbera and Tex Avery animations warped and fractured in the artist’s signature style. Mr Twiddle himself is a zookeeper from the Hanna-Barbera show Wally Gator (1962-1963). Here, the simple, graphic form of the cartoon character—the flat blues, yellows and blacks of his uniform, his cheerful grin and five-o’clock shadow—is seen as if through a funhouse mirror. Parts of his nose, mouth and hat repeat in a glitchy reflection. The background’s soft yellows reveal ghostly pentimenti of other figures, eyes and teeth. Deliberate spatters and marks and in paint, charcoal and pastel bedeck the painting’s surface, like patina on an archaeological relic.
Since emerging as an artist in 1980s New York, Condo has plundered a kaleidoscopic array of art-historical references from Rembrandt to Picasso. He has focused particularly on traditions of portraiture, offering a new, postmodern way of seeing our inner lives. He renders his subjects in multifaceted, chimeric forms that, for all their outlandishness, resonate with universal experiences of shifting selfhood. He has described this practice ‘as psychological cubism. Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states’ (G. Condo, quoted in S. Jeffries, ‘George Condo: “I was delirious. Nearly died”’, The Guardian, 10 February 2014). Mr Twiddle is refracted through the same existential lens.
In their use of cultural archetypes, Condo’s ‘Cartoon Abstractions’ evoke the comic-based language of artists such as Roy Lichtenstein. They also introduce a Pop element of societal critique. ‘Often these paintings insinuate a landscape of decaying beliefs and failing mythologies’, wrote Ralph Rugoff of the artist’s post-2000s work. ‘… As our surrogates, the artist’s subjects appear to embody both the cartoonishness of contemporary media culture and the pervasive sense of inadequacy and failure that it engenders’ (R. Rugoff, ‘The Mental States of America’ in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. New Museum, New York, 2011, p. 19). The character in Mr Twiddle dates to Condo’s own childhood and evokes nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent age, when hierarchies and images could be relied upon. Distorted, beset by spectres and worn as if by the passage of time, in Condo’s painting he is transformed into a startlingly honest portrait of contemporary life.
Since emerging as an artist in 1980s New York, Condo has plundered a kaleidoscopic array of art-historical references from Rembrandt to Picasso. He has focused particularly on traditions of portraiture, offering a new, postmodern way of seeing our inner lives. He renders his subjects in multifaceted, chimeric forms that, for all their outlandishness, resonate with universal experiences of shifting selfhood. He has described this practice ‘as psychological cubism. Picasso painted a violin from four different perspectives at one moment. I do the same with psychological states’ (G. Condo, quoted in S. Jeffries, ‘George Condo: “I was delirious. Nearly died”’, The Guardian, 10 February 2014). Mr Twiddle is refracted through the same existential lens.
In their use of cultural archetypes, Condo’s ‘Cartoon Abstractions’ evoke the comic-based language of artists such as Roy Lichtenstein. They also introduce a Pop element of societal critique. ‘Often these paintings insinuate a landscape of decaying beliefs and failing mythologies’, wrote Ralph Rugoff of the artist’s post-2000s work. ‘… As our surrogates, the artist’s subjects appear to embody both the cartoonishness of contemporary media culture and the pervasive sense of inadequacy and failure that it engenders’ (R. Rugoff, ‘The Mental States of America’ in George Condo: Mental States, exh. cat. New Museum, New York, 2011, p. 19). The character in Mr Twiddle dates to Condo’s own childhood and evokes nostalgia for a simpler, more innocent age, when hierarchies and images could be relied upon. Distorted, beset by spectres and worn as if by the passage of time, in Condo’s painting he is transformed into a startlingly honest portrait of contemporary life.