George Condo

George Condo is a contemporary American artist known for his distinct figurative paintings that blend European Old Master techniques with American pop culture. Drawing on the visual vocabulary of artists from Diego Velázquez to Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning, his highly emotional portraits convey the chaos of human existence, often with disturbing or aggressive undertones and sometimes depicting real-life figures. Condo coined the term Artificial Realism, which he explained as “the realistic representation of that which is artificial,” to describe his own particular sensibility.

Condo became a fixture of the East Village scene in the early 1980s. Alongside fellow painters Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he was an integral part of the movement that is widely credited to have revived figurative painting. Condo’s work influenced many artists not only of his own generation but also subsequent ones, including John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Glenn Brown. In 2011, his major retrospective exhibition at the New Museum confirmed his continuing relevance and significance, and his paintings are held in renowned public and private collections worldwide. Condo was born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire, and currently lives in New York.

Nude and Forms, 2014

DAY OF THE IDOL, 2011