Selected Works

George Condo was born in 1957, in Concord, New Hampshire, US.

He is a modern American artist known for his distinctive figurative paintings and prints.

For nearly four decades, Condo has held a central position in the landscape of American painting. His distinct and imaginative visual language pays homage to a wide range of art-historical traditions and genres, combining elements of Old Master portraiture with references to contemporary American culture. The astonishing range of sources from which his pictorial vocabulary draws is often noted, however, this continuity across his vastly diverse painting practice bears witness to his achievement in absorbing the revolutionary genius of Picasso, Velazquez, Matisse, Arcimboldo, Pollock, Twombly, and countless others and making them new; characteristically his own. “I describe my work as psychological Cubism,” the artist says of his work.

Condo has attended the University of Massachusetts in Lowell to study art history and music theory. He was a member of the band ‘The Girls’ in the late 1970s when he met Jean-Michel Basquiat at a show in New York; it was Basquiat who suggested he move to New York to pursue an art career. Between 1981 and 1983, Condo’s first public exhibitions were held in East Village galleries. After a brief stretch working in Andy Warhol’s Factory, Condo relocated to Paris in 1985 and stayed there for a decade.

His influence can be seen in the work of a variety of contemporary painters, including John Currin, Glenn Brown, and Lisa Yuskavage. Condo has also collaborated with musician Kanye West on the cover art for his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010. The artist was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition, “Mental States,” at the New Museum a year later.

Condo is currently based in New York and its paintings can now be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

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