George Condo’s Figures in Motion : Inside the Psychological Theatre Heading to Sotheby’s Hong Kong
A pivotal 2013 painting brings George Condo’s fractured figures, multiple states of consciousness and “psychological cubism” to Sotheby’s Hong Kong this September.
There are paintings that depict a scene, and there are paintings that seem to contain several scenes at once.
George Condo’s Figures in Motion, painted in 2013, belongs unmistakably to the second category.
The large-scale work is coming to Sotheby’s Modern & Contemporary Evening Auction in Hong Kong on September 28, 2026, where it carries an estimate of HK$24 million 40 million, approximately US$3.06 million–$5.10 million.
At first glance, Figures in Motion appears almost exuberant: colour, faces, limbs and abstract forms collide across the surface. But beneath that visual abundance is one of the central ideas of Condo’s practice the attempt to represent not simply what a person looks like, but what might be happening inside the mind.
© Sotheby’s
Condo has famously described his method as “psychological cubism.” His analogy is revealing: where Picasso could depict a violin from several perspectives simultaneously, Condo applies the same principle to psychological states.
The result is a peculiar kind of portraiture in which identity becomes unstable. Faces fragment. Bodies overlap. Profiles emerge and disappear. One character seems to contain another. The eye begins to organise the composition, only to lose that organisation again.
Sotheby’s describes Figures in Motion as a defining work from a milestone year in Condo’s career, emphasising its combination of abstraction, figuration and satire. The artist participated in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, placing the painting within a particularly important moment in his international career. The work is executed in acrylic, charcoal and pastel on linen and measures approximately 151 by 160 centimetres. There is also something almost musical about its construction.
Condo’s compositions often behave less like conventional portraits than orchestral arrangements. Forms overlap as if several instruments were playing simultaneously. A face becomes a rhythm; a line becomes a counterpoint; colour becomes another psychological register. That analogy is not merely poetic. Philosopher Félix Guattari, writing about Condo, compared the artist’s paintings to musical structures in which lines, forms and colours exist in a temporal relationship. And beneath Condo’s apparent chaos lies an exceptionally sophisticated conversation with art history.
Picasso is one of the most obvious presences. The fragmented heads and dislocated bodies in Figures in Motion recall Cubism, but Condo does not simply reproduce its vocabulary. He uses fragmentation as a psychological device a way of suggesting that consciousness itself is plural, unstable and constantly shifting.
This is why the painting remains compelling beyond its auction value. The market will inevitably focus on the estimate. Yet the more interesting story is what the estimate tells us about the place Condo now occupies within contemporary painting. Figures in Motion has already appeared at auction before: Christie’s offered the same 2013 work in London in 2018, where it sold for £1,868,750 against an estimate of £1–1.5 million.
Its return to the market eight years later offers a fascinating opportunity to reconsider the work not simply as a financial asset, but as a document of Condo’s continuing engagement with the history of painting.
In Hong Kong, Figures in Motion will enter a market increasingly central to the global circulation of contemporary art.
The painting arrives with no single answer. Instead, it offers a crowd of them fragmented, comic, unsettling, elegant and alive.
Perhaps that is precisely the point of George Condo’s art: the mind is never a single image. Why should a portrait be?
© Sotheby’s
Patricia Holdener
Editor-In-Chief
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