George Condo.
Confrontation November 19, 2016 - May 1, 2017
Museum Berggruen

“It's about bringing things together and seeing how they react to each other.
While a dialogue is more of a platform for peaceful and almost dry discussions. You have dialogues every day. I could have a dialogue every day with the woman in the pastry shop down the street. But if I say to her: 'There's something wrong with the icing. Why is it blue?' – then suddenly we are more in a confrontation. And then something happens that stays in your memory!” George Condo, 2016

From November 19, 2016, the Berggruen Museum will be showing a showcase of the work of the American painter George Condo (*1957 in Concord, New Hampshire, USA). This first major exhibition of contemporary art since the founding of the Museum Berggruen relates Condo's works from the early 1980s to the present day to classical modern artists from the National Gallery's collection. George Condo. Confrontation plays in all rooms of the house and a large proportion of Condo's selected paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures will be exhibited publicly for the first time.

The presentation of masterpieces by Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, Klee and Giacometti from the Berggruen Museum, including Condo's works, opens up an open field of references. Since the early 1980s, Condo's works have referenced the entire spectrum of European and American art with a mixture of humor, irony and reverence. For his sometimes grotesque image inventions, he draws on genres such as nudes, still lifes and portraits. Condo playfully combines art historical references, particularly formal and motivic references to the artists of classical modernism, whose once shocking cubist images have long since entered the canon of art history. To the same extent, popular culture flows into Condo's work and his portraits, for example, show borrowings from comic characters such as Batman, Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse.

The George Condo exhibition. Confrontation at the Berggruen Museum sees painting in the 20th and 21st centuries as a constantly moving process of mutual references and traditions.