Lot 418 | "Screaming couple"

CONDO, GEORGE
1957 Concord//New Hampshire

Title: "Screaming couple".
Date: 2005.
Technique: Oil on canvas.
Measurement: 81 x 71cm.
Notation: Signed and dated top left Additionally titled as well as once more signed and dated verso: Condo 05.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.


Provenance:
- de Pury & Luxembourg, Zurich
- Luhring Augustine Gallery (label)

Exhibitions:
- Folkwang Museum, Essen 2007
- Kunsthalle Krems, 2010
- me Collectors Room, Berlin 2019

Literature:
- Eskildsen, Ute/Olbricht, Thomas: Rockers island - Olbricht collection, Göttingen 2007, p. 268, ill. p. 39
- Schoppmann, Wolfgang/Wipplinger, Hans-Peter (ed.); Lebenslust & Totentanz - Olbricht collection, Cologne/Krems 2010, p. 183 (w/o ill.)

George Condo is one of the most successful and interesting American artists. In his early years he worked in Warhol's Factory and was friends with the painters Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He is also acquainted with the writers Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs and Félix Guattari. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Condo lived in New York and Paris and for a short time even in Cologne, where he worked with artists of the Mülheimer Freiheit such as Walter Dahn or Jiri Georg Dokoupil.

Condo's grotesque and humorous pictorial worlds show overdrawn figures, hybrids of old master models with comic-like and pop-cultural elements. In this sense, he calls his style himself "artificial realism". Since he wants to capture several sides of a character of the sitter on the canvas - very similar to Picasso in his Cubist phase - he also calls his style "Psychological Cubism". Besides Pablo Picasso, influences from Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon can be found in his works. Condo himself inspired renowned artists of the following generation such as John Currin and Glenn Brown.

In the presented work "Screaming Couple", the viewer becomes witness to the sexual act between a man and a woman on an armchair or bed-like structure sliding into the abstract against a blue background. The pink and orange incarnate parts of the almost naked bodies stand out as a complementary contrast to this blue. Accents are set by the red.

Our voyeuristic ego is drawn into the picture on the one hand by observing the intimate act. On the other hand, the protagonists seem to draw our attention to this very circumstance and make us feel uneasy again. The woman's head and upper body are turned toward us. Her face, like that of her partner, is distorted and exaggerated. With her mouth wide open, she stands up to the viewer's gaze like a predator and seems to want to attack. The man also "grinds" his teeth and looks at us. We look at the couple, but the couple also looks at us - even the woman's breasts appear like two eyes staring at us. The artist skillfully lets the axes of vision wander back and forth. In addition, he combines the harmony of the colours with the dynamics of the gestures and picture lines. The synaesthesia of the image and sound can also be found in this work because the roar of the "Screaming Couple" seems to echo out of the painting.