George Condo was born in Concord, New Hampshire, and studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts. From the beginning, his creative instincts lived somewhere between classical rigor and punk disruption — a duality that would come to define his art. In the early 1980s, after a stint working at Andy Warhol’s Factory, Condo moved between New York and Europe, developing what he would later call “artificial realism”: a blend of traditional European painting techniques with warped, surreal, and sometimes grotesque characters born from his imagination.
Condo’s figures — at once comical, disturbing, regal, and fractured — seem to teeter on the edge of psychological collapse. Drawing from Old Master painting, Cubism, Surrealism, and American pop culture, his work is less about creating narratives and more about manifesting states of mind. Faces split open, eyes multiply, bodies distort — all painted with astonishing technical command. His characters reflect the chaos of contemporary identity: the tension between civility and impulse, surface and breakdown, sincerity and parody.
Throughout his four-decade career, Condo has exhibited in major institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Tate Modern. His work is held in collections such as MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and the Guggenheim. He’s collaborated with artists and musicians like Kanye West, whose My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy album cover he designed. For Condo, painting is a space of total invention — where the traditions of the past are reimagined with wit, violence, elegance, and an unflinching gaze into the fractured psyche of modern life.
