Dozens of George Condo’s Artworks Highlight “Between Madness and Beauty” Sale
On May 21, Christie’s will sell a selection of the artist’s paintings, works on paper, and sculptures as part of the final day of their Spring Marquee Week Sales
It’s almost Marquee Week, when the powerhouses of the auction world set their sights on New York City. The art and design worlds will be in a metropolitan whirl with NYC Design Week, Frieze New York, TEFAF, and ICFF converging. Before the week-and-a-half is through, there will be trends set, records broken, careers established, and sparkling events galore. Into this rich mix, Christie’s is adding a key contemporary art offering: “Between Madness and Beauty: Selections from the Anna Condo Collection.”
The Condo auction features a remarkable selection of artworks created by George Condo between 1996 and 2013. They bridge a broad range of themes and styles within his work. Michael Baptist, head of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale at Christie’s, reflected on the wonderful diversity of Condo’s work from this period, “You can see George working through different techniques and different visual motifs, and I like that there are these very busy linear works that are very colorful. And then there are other works where he is working almost in monochrome with one tone and kind of challenging himself to achieve beauty in a different way. He never falls back on his laurels, he seems to always be pushing himself forward and challenging his own techniques.”
The inspiration behind the “Between Madness and Beauty” name came from an article on George Condo that ran in Bomb magazine in 1992, but it exemplifies motifs present throughout his body of work. As Baptist put it, “You can look at literally the contrast of madness and beauty in the paintings he’s making today, the way he’s often combining chaos with objectively beautiful female forms, clearly it’s something that he’s interested in, and he’s going to be interested in for as long as he’s making art.” Indeed, roughly 2/3 of the artworks in “Between Madness and Beauty” refer to the female form.
Some of the highlights include two works from the “Mental States” series, a bronze Rodrigo and the Maid sculpture and a near-monochrome Picassoid Untitled of two angles on a female face. A total of nine canvases will be in the sale. A particular standout is 2001’s Untitled, which strikingly presages themes and visuals memorably rendered in the movie The Substance. Colorful eyes bloom off the canvas like cells subdividing.
Baptist worked closely with Anna Condo to arrange the sale. “She has a vision, I think, in everything she does, and she and I worked together on the selection and she really drove that, in terms of which works are in the grouping.” Recent sales prices for Condo’s work include $6.85 million for Force Field in 2020 and $5 million for Linnear Connection in 2021 (both sales achieved at Christie’s). His large paintings typically sell in the millions. Many of the works in “Between Madness and Beauty” have never before been seen in public. They will be on view in a special gallery at the auction house’s Rockefeller Center headquarters from May 9–21.
