George Condo's Jesters Opens January 28 at Gallery Met

On Monday, January 28, the Arnold & Marie Schwartz Gallery Met will open George Condo'sJesters, presented in conjunction with the new Metropolitan Opera production of Rigoletto. Condo has created 9 original ink-on-paper drawings of jesters for the show, which will be on display through May 11. The Met's new production of Rigoletto, Verdi's opera about a court jester whose life unravels after his insults go too far, will premiere January 28.

Condo has been a major figure in the contemporary art world for more than 30 years. His paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints have come to define the genre known as "artificial realism," which juxtaposes the traditional techniques of painting with a realist's view of the man-made world we live in today. Holland Cotter of The New York Times praised the 2011 New Museum retrospective of Condo's work as "a tour-de-force of stylistic multitasking and figurative variety...within the world of Mr. Condo's portraits, nothing is 'just' anything."

Jesters will be Condo's first solo show at Gallery Met, though he has contributed well-received works to two previous group exhibitions. His painting of Rosina from IL Barbiere di Siviglia was part of Heroines, the gallery's inaugural show, and he also contributed a painting to 2009'sSomething About Mary, a series of portraits of Mary Magdalene presented in conjunction with a new Met production of Tosca.

"I've been painting clowns since 1985-my favorite archetypal American hero-loser," Condo said of Jesters. "The jester has to entertain you and at the same time repel you. He has a multiplicity of qualities, and I thought that would give me a great opportunity to work with different planes that recede and come forward architecturally, like the planes and perspectives within a single portrait."