At Home with George Condo

 

George Condo: I am sitting in the kitchen with my laptop on the counter. I get better service in here. Out my window, there is a magnolia tree about to blossom. It’s a very bright blue day, 10:50 am and I’m out on Long Island. I left New York City about four weeks ago, just to randomly take a break from work, and I’m sorry for what is happening there now but glad not to be in the midst of it.

 

 

GC: Well, my approach to art began a lot earlier than the 1980s to be honest. I really started when I was a child of about three years old and kept going ever since. In fact, many of the pictures I made in my teens, like in 1975, were shown in the museum exhibition ‘The Way I Think' at the Phillips Collection in Washington DC and The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. And the Tate Modern acquired one from 1976. The reason I mention this is because in 1984 I did my first of a series of paintings I called the ‘expanding canvases.' The MoMA has the first one, called Diaries of Milan. It’s an all-over compositional approach similar to Pollock, but instead of gestures there is this microcosmic interconnection of thousands of actual things, like what you think you see when you look at a Pollock or at static on a television screen, but in my case, it’s delineated. A stream of conscious type of painting basically unedited as I go through it. A bit influenced by Kerouac and the way he would just write a manuscript from start to finish.

 

 

GC: I would say Kandinsky, Picasso, Caravaggio and then about a million others. The reason for the first three is that each of them created their own language which was somehow comprised of everything that came before them and took it to a new level. That's my intention as an artist.

 

GC: When I first met Basquiat, because he was the first guy I met in New York that was an artist and he told me to move there. So I did in 1979, late December after Christmas, and I remember waking up on 1 January, 1980 and saying ‘this is where I live, thank you Jean.'