For his third solo exhibition at the gallery which has been representing him for ten years now, George Condo has created a brand-new group of paintings inspired by cartoon characters from the 1950s and 1960s. This new series marks a turning point in George Condo’s work although it still carries on seamlessly his research into painting, which lies somewhere between realism and abstraction. Inspired mainly by Tex Avery, Hanna-Barbera and Looney Tunes characters - some of them now forgotten – George Condo shows here the original outlines of these characters which are used as the central starting point for his painting, extending the black outlines which sketch out their contours in order to produce an abstract composition which will cover the remainder of the canvas…
The analysis developed by the French art critic and curator Eric Troncy highlight  the different references and inspiration sources within History of Art  as  well  as contemporary  culture.

Bilingual French-English text by Eric Troncy.

The 26 paintings on canvas of this series, exhibited at the gallery in 2004, mark an essential step in the artist’s journey within the History of Art.
In this series, Condo decodes the structure of the paintings of the great masters whom he admires, and focuses on the symbolic character of the compositions, like on the large diagonals of David’s heroic portraits or on the role of the shadows within Manet’s and Velasquez’ paintings.
Thanks to this analysis, Condo manages to capture the expressive power and the message of these works, of which he reinterprets the compositional structure to apply it then to its characters, notably to the Cardinals.
Their physiognomy concentrates in them all the grotesque of an epoch that Condo is reflecting, reminding us so that the artist goes back into the past to go further into the future.

Bilingual French & English text by Peter Fleissig, Editor of Powerhouse in Memphis.

Published at the occasion of Condo’s first personal exhibition at the gallery in 2001, this catalogue unveils us how the artist’s figurative paintings relate to abstraction. The works exhibited actually cope with a gesture painting liberated thanks to the automatic thinking process used by the artist in this series. Condo puts so aside several portraits very freely to achieve partly abstract paintings, within a very fragmented composition, where external appearance and internal state of mind mix together. So is Condo representing the nature of the present human condition, as he feels and observes it.

Bilingual French & English essay by Bernard Marcadé. Biographical notes. Selective literature. List of personal exhibitions.