George Condo

George Condo is an American artist who was born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1957. He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. He settled in New York city in the late 1970's, where he became a recognized figure within the East Village art scene, even spending a brief time working in Andy Warhol's Factory. He moved to Paris, France in 1985 and lived there for a decade. George Condo currently lives and works in New York city.

George Condo has occupied a central position in the landscape of American painting for nearly forty years. His unique and imaginative visual language pays tribute to a vast array of art-historical traditions and genres, drawing together elements of Old Master portraiture with allusions to contemporary American culture. He is best known for his distinctive, deformed and sometimes demonic paintings that combine figuration and abstraction, madness and beauty. Condo coined the term 'Artificial Realism', to describe his approach or, in other words, 'the realistic representation of that which is artificial'. His work is populated largely by dramatically stylized, almost cartoonish, characters with exaggerated, often grotesque features such as protruding over or under bites, ghoulish expressions, or is fractured nearly beyond recognition.

Condo's work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Judith Rothschild Foundation, Philadelphia; Broad Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Marciano Art Foundation, Los Angeles; Tate Modern, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fonds National d'Art Contemporain, Ministère de la Culture, Paris; Fonds Regional d'Art Contemporain, Ile de France, Paris; Staedel Museum, Frankfurt; Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation, Athens; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo; Museu d'Art Contemporani, Barcelona; the Doron Sebbag Art Collection, ORS Ltd., Tel Aviv; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. In 2019, he was selected to participate in the 58th International Art Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia. He was also the subject of a major retrospective of works on paper titled The Way I Think at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C., in early 2017, which travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark in the Fall of 2017. In 2016 Condo's work was the feature of a museum-wide exhibition, Confrontation, at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Museum Berggruen, Berlin. In 2011, the New Museum, New York presented the retrospective exhibition, Mental States. This exhibition travelled to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Hayward Gallery, London; and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt.