George Condo: The Mad and the Lonely

For the past few years, DESTE Foundation’s annual summer exhibition on the charming island of Hydra is something that all art-lovers have come to eagerly anticipate. Especially since Jeff Koons' 2022 show (after which he generously donated his Apollo Wind Spinner to the island,) a weekend escape to this picture-perfect Saronic Gulf getaway is a must-do for all aesthetes. Much like catching an Athens Epidaurus Festival performance at the Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus every summer.

This year, American visual artist George Condo's career-spanning exhibition The Mad and the Lonely takes over DESTE's Project Space, a former slaughterhouse turned exhibition space. The show is a stirring collection of small-scale paintings and sculptures that showcase Condo’s portrait style, blending the eerie, the grotesque, the exaggerated, and the strikingly human. His characters, slightly on the bizarre side, represent society’s outcasts on the edge of madness and loneliness. The method is somewhat of a mix of Renaissance elegance, Cubist fragmentation, and the allure of Surrealism, all brought together in Condo’s signature “Psychological Cubism” style. Think of it as stepping onto the set of a Tim Burton movie but with a fine arts twist.