Downtown New York

George Condo gained a name for himself on the effervescent New York art scene of the 1990s for his cartoonish, tragic-comic figures with dislocated, clown-like faces. His painting, which he describes as a “realistic representation of the artificial,” is grounded in his knowledge of the history of art, whose great movements he revisits. The figures in Downtown New York thus take up the Cubist vocabulary of Picasso, while the areas of flat colour evoke colour field painting. In the energy of its line, its touches of bright colour and its play on the materiality of paint, this canvas displays an affinity with the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat.