George Condo - Plate 18 Parallel Figures (2011) I Limited Edition

Plate 18 — Parallel Figures (2011) is one of the most compositionally ambitious plates in George Condo's limited edition portfolio — a dense, horizontal crowd scene in which a multitude of his signature grotesque figures press together across the full width of the image in a composition that simultaneously evokes Goya's black paintings, Ensor's masked processions, and the fragmented simultaneity of Cubism. Figures overlap, merge, and separate; faces grimace, leer, and stare; geometric fragments of yellow, blue, and orange punctuate the muted grey-brown ground like shards of stained glass in a ruined cathedral.

The title — Parallel Figures — is characteristic of Condo's ironic precision: the figures are anything but parallel in the orderly sense, yet they occupy the same horizontal plane, the same moment, the same picture, each pursuing their own psychological trajectory while remaining bound together in a composition that refuses to resolve into hierarchy or narrative. They are parallel in the sense of existing simultaneously, of sharing a world without sharing a purpose — a condition Condo has always understood as fundamentally comic and fundamentally tragic in equal measure.

Where Compression VI (Plate 15) focuses the psychological intensity into a single head, Parallel Figures explodes it outward into a crowd — the same emotional vocabulary distributed across a multitude, each figure a fragment of a psyche that the composition as a whole refuses to unify. The two plates function as natural complements: the singular and the plural, the intimate and the panoramic, both governed by the same visual intelligence and the same refusal to offer psychological resolution.

Condo's work is held in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Centre Pompidou, Tate, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Plates from this portfolio are among the most sought-after editions in his graphic catalogue.