George Condo, The Insane Queen, 2006. Oil on canvas, 20 x 16 in (50.8 x 40.6 cm). Collection Per Skarstedt. © George Condo 2010

A short trip down Prince Street to the New Museum, get your tickets (it’s free if you’re under 18) and up the elevator you go. The doors open on the 4th floor with a clank. Suddenly your sense of being becomes a lot smaller, overwhelmed by giant portraits of what some how resembles your family members.

“George Condo: Mental States” features a series of portraits that lie roughly 20 feet high and 40 feet wide on the gallery wall. With around 30 faces to look at or away from you are humbled down, almost timid to get too close. The figures in the various sized canvases are filled with an abundance of stories, making the room almost feel awkward in the silence. A slightly gruesome face illustrates one of the most amazing concepts in art, physiological cubism.

As the viewer we are forced to see and feel multiple emotions at the same time, pulling and pushing us away from the art. Conflicted and confused on where to turn, what to look at, what to feel, until you are so feed up with the constant philosophical mind battle you are induring, you turn and walk into the next gallery. Abstraction! And somehow your mind feels at see to see the visual representation of what is going on inside your own head.  Like cold water after running, it’s pleasing to the senses — a concept we are semi-able to wrap our brains around. Figures and lines dancing around the canvases to the jazz of Miles Davis. The layers and complexity of figures are reviled, giving you the sense “this is what you can handle.”

Psychology, philosophy, and art — definitely the same thing here, with George Condo.

[This exhibition closed on May 8, 2011.  Sad face.]