A Descent into the Casino – Adam Kimmel’s Collaboration with George Condo

Adam Kimmel, men’s fashion designer introduction to his Fall/Winter 2010 collection represented a major creative inflection point for the menswear designer and for his collaborator, artist George Condo. Condo’s passion for gambling, brought to visual life in paintings of his nattily attired, clown-animal-human hybrid characters gathered around baccarat and craps tables, inspired the masks for the models in Kimmel’s equally distinctive Casino collection. The masks themselves were fashioned by filmmaker and prosthetics wizard Gabe Bartalos, using Condo’s exaggerated-feature heads as templates.

The result of the collaboration between the two American creators brought a New World insouciance to the Old World glamour and high-voltage tension of traditional gaming tables in the Yvon Lambert Gallery in the Marais where the show took place. Models clown-headed by Condo character masks—Super Dude, Crucified Thief, Bill Tarzan, the Barber, and more—strutted, leaned, and lounged around the tables.

The making of a design tableau

This choice of collaborator, the latest in Kimmel’s string of successful partnerships with artists, resulted in a collection that threw the designer’s sleek aesthetic, his independent perspective, his strengths in meticulous craftsmanship—and his talent for thumbing his nose at convention to build ambitious, multisensory experiences—into high relief against the chiaroscuro backdrop of his theme.

Writing in Style.com in 2012, critic Tim Blanks compared Kimmel to “a great moviemaker” who can find the core imagery inherent in American myths to bring depth to all his shows.

For the Casino show, Kimmel realized his vision by adorning the characters with shawl-collar tuxedos, bomber jackets, V-neck cashmere sweaters, and jewel-hued velvet smoking jackets that moved Condo’s two-dimensional images into 3-D. There were silk scarves and velvet dress slippers. There were pleated dress pants and bow ties topping off shirts with tucked pleats. The visual and textural feast included ties imprinted with dice images and capes imprinted with roulette images.

Portrait of the artist as a badass

Of all the artists he’d worked with up to that time, Adam Kimmel called Condo “the most badass” stylist he’d ever worked with.

George Condo’s richly original body of work is a natural for translation into the medium of fashion. Born in New Hampshire in 1957, he took his early inspiration from Baroque and Rococo art while a student at the University of Massachusetts, before joining a punk band. He went to Los Angeles to learn how to incorporate the glazing techniques of the Old Masters into his paintings. In New York, he made prints for Andy Warhol.

In Europe in the early 1980s, Condo became part of the anarchic painter group called variously the “Young Wild Ones” and the “Mülheimer Freiheit” group because of their shared studio based at the address Mülheimer Freiheit 110 in Cologne.

Condo spent the mid-’80s through the mid-’90s in Europe, where he developed his signature style of “artificial realism”—a realistic representation of the artificial, is how he described it—and expanded his universe of painting into sculpture.

After relocating back to New York in 1995, he garnered an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art in 1999. In the years since, he’s racked up an impressive body of awards that include a 2013 honor from the New York Studio School and a 2018 gala honor from BOMB Magazine.

Creativity in retrospect

Condo has exhibited regularly in a wide range of biennials worldwide, notably including the 2019 58th Venice Biennale, whose theme was “May You Live in Interesting Times.” His work is held in public collections in numerous museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Museu d’Art Contemporani in Barcelona, and the Tate Modern in London.

Retrospective exhibits of Condo’s work have appeared in long-term and traveling exhibits throughout the world. In 2016, the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin—Museum Berggruen in Berlin presented “Confrontation,” which juxtaposed works by Condo alongside world masterpieces by some of his major historical influences: Paul Klee, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Pablo Picasso, and others.

Humanity remade

Condo has built his career out of fashioning images of the “almost-human,” as Charles Moore wrote in ArtSeen in early 2023, when the artist’s solo show Humanoids debuted at the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, highlighting decades of his work.

When encountered from far away, Condo’s figures seem as if they could be human. When approached, they reveal the parts of themselves that are—to the eye, if not to the understanding—decidedly not human: They sport Giacometti-long necks that take on the air of sausages, a twisting of red for a nose, splashes of green for ears, or rows of shark-like teeth. In this exhibition, Condo’s work showed how he took his inspirations for a walk, deforming and reforming the Cubist esthetic honed by Picasso into something uniquely his own.

And underneath it all, one can hear the hum of Condo’s explanation for why he chose to focus his work on “humanoids:” because he had ceased to find humans visually interesting.

As Condo has described this work, a “humanoid” is a creature with emotions lying just at the surface of self-consciousness. The manifold ways in which this artist can play on our preconceived perceptions and emotions—and create new ones for us—were richly on display in the Humanoids exhibition. Just as they were in that Marais gallery in 2010, when Adam Kimmel’s and George Condo’s muses met to shape a creative experience that was more resonant—aesthetically, psychologically, and historically—than the sum of its parts.

Photo: Dazed Digital