George Condo

George Condo (United States, 1957) studied art history at the University of Massachusetts. He works in painting and sculpture, exploring genres such as portraiture, vanitas, and still lifes. After a stint as a punk musician, he settled in Manhattan in the early 1980s, where he worked at Andy Warhol’s Factory and helped spearhead a return to painting alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring.

His figurative style, which he himself calls “artificial realism,” fuses traditional European painting with American Pop Art, Cubism, and classical art. Through the use of flat colors, irony, and eroticism, he creates dislocated, grotesque figures and unsettling characters to explore the psyche and the human condition.

He has exhibited continuously since the 1980s in the United States and Europe. Notable among his retrospectives are the one at the New Museum in New York (2011)—which traveled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Hayward Gallery in London, and the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt—and the one at the Phillips Collection in Washington (2017)—which traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek. His works are included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate in London, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the MACBA in Barcelona.