By Della Hasselle
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
EAST VILLAGE — An exhibit at the New Museum features depictions of former Gov. Eliot Spitzer in flagrante and a deranged Queen Elizabeth painted by the artist responsible for Kanye West's racy album cover for "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy."
"George Condo: Mental States" features 28 years of large-scale paintings in the cartoonish not-safe-for-work style that the artist used to depict Kanye coupling with an angel on his album cover. While that image isn’t included in the exhibit, Condo’s 2008 painting, "The Return of Client No. 9" depicts a beast-like portrait of Eliot Spitzer in the company of a presumed prostitute and a collection of alcohol bottles.
"Ultimately, these paintings offer a biting commentary on our contemporary culture’s noisy and continuous stream of scandals, meltdowns, and celebrity farragoes, as well as its cults of excess and fanaticism," the exhibit description reads.
Condo also presents a host of other less-prominent subjects, including anonymous stockbrokers, janitors and alcoholics.
His "dehumanized subjects" are often depicted with maniacal grins and bulging eyes and set against dark and moody backgrounds, according to Ralph Rugoff, curator and director of the Hayward Gallery.
"They appear as disenfranchized characters helplessly resisting their own alienation," Rugoff said in a release.
The Stockbroker (2002), depicts an almost-featureless couple in which the man wears a dress shirt and tie but no pants and the woman clutches a doll.
"While this portrait admittedly walks a wobbly line between pathos, hilarity and the grotesque, it is difficult to think of many contemporary artworks that have so intimately engaged the human fallout from our deregulated economy," Rugoff said.
