George Condo

George Condo has maintained a central position in the American contemporary art scene for the past forty years. His visual vocabulary pays tribute to an array of genres - from cubism and surrealism, to the referencing of old master portraiture and contemporary American culture. Celebrated for his confrontational, contorted and twisted characters, Condo’s works are composites of various psychological states painted distinctly different.

Born in 1957, George grew up in Concord, New Hampshire. He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts. After just two years, Condo left and began work in a silkscreen shop in Boston. Whilst there, he joined a band called ‘The Girls’, which led him to meeting renowned street artist, Jean Michel Basquiat. Condo later relocated to New York, where he worked as a printer on Andy Warhol’s ‘Myths’ series.

In 1983, Condo had his first solo show at the Ulrike Cantor Gallery in Los Angeles, followed by a show at Germany’s Monika Sprueth Gallery, which would mark his debut in Europe. Subsequently, Condo spent nearly a decade in Europe before returning to New York in 1995. During this period, the birth of ‘artificial realism’ would welcome his works and would continue to - the idea of representing reality, but it being a construction of man-made appearances. In one of his most recent studies, ‘Together and Apart’ (2020), figures overlap combining multiple viewpoints so as to reflect the spectrum of human emotions as well as the multitude of mental states. 

George Condo has been commissioned for book covers as well as album covers - most notably he was commissioned by Kanye West, to create a series of paintings for his album, ‘My Beautiful Dark twisted Fantasy’. No matter the medium, Condo has stood by his aesthetic creating a uniquely inventive oeuvre that continues to move and delight.