George Condo Concord, MA, USA, b. 1957
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Photo: Mr Adrian Gaut/Trunk Archive -
George Condo is widely recognized as one of the most influential American artists of his generation. Renowned for his singular brand of figuration, he developed a style that fuses the elegance of classical painting with the fractured intensity of the modern psyche.
Lives and works in New York, NY, USA
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His works are populated by grotesque, exaggerated, and often comically disfigured characters — figures that reflect the absurdities, contradictions, and inner anxieties of contemporary life.
Condo studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. In the early 1980s, he worked briefly at Andy Warhol’s Factory, an experience that shaped his understanding of both American iconography and the mechanisms of the art world. In 1985, he moved to Paris, where he spent a decade immersed in the legacy of European painting before returning to New York in the mid-1990s.
“I felt I had to come back to New York with a statement that would stand up against Andy Warhol’s soup cans. And the irony was that it turned out to be Old Master painting.”
— George Condo
His engagement with the Old Masters became the foundation of his own artistic language, combining influences from Velázquez, Goya, and Rembrandt, refracted through the lens of American visual culture. Condo coined the term Artificial Realism to describe this approach — “the realistic representation of that which is artificial.”
His paintings form a bold fusion of European traditions with the aesthetics of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Francis Bacon’s Studies of the Human Body, and Willem de Kooning’s female figures, enriched by references to kitsch and American popular culture — from Playboy magazine to comics and animation. They are not conventional portraits but imagined personalities, fractured and reassembled into visual manifestations of psychological states.
The artist describes his style as psychological cubism, aiming not so much to dismantle traditional form as to convey a multiplicity of emotional and mental experiences coexisting within a single image. His characters evoke both empathy and unease; they appear familiar yet distorted. Their dual nature — at once alluring and unsettling — reflects the inner contradictions of human psychology.
Condo’s painting strikes a subtle balance between refinement and destruction. Positioned between cultural memory and the visual aggression of the present, he reimagines the portrait genre, turning the human figure into a graphic reflection of inner conflict and fragmented consciousness. What emerges in his work is not unity or narrative but the reverse side of reality — a heightened perception that exposes illusion and reveals the complex spectrum of emotional and psychological states.
Selected solo exhibitions include:
George Condo at Cycladic Museum (Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens, 2018), The Way I Think (The Phillips Collection, Washington, 2017), Confrontation (Museum Berggruen, Berlin, 2016–2017), George Condo. Selections from a Private Collection (The Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, 2016), and Mental States (New Museum, New York, 2011–2012).
Condo’s works are represented in major public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) (New York), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), National Gallery of Art (Washington), Museum of Fine Arts (Houston), Tate (London), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), Fonds National d’Art Contemporain (Paris), Städel Museum (Frankfurt), Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art (Oslo), Museu d’Art Contemporani (Barcelona), The Broad Art Foundation (Los Angeles), Albright-Knox Art Gallery (Buffalo), Moderna Museet (Stockholm), Judith Rothschild Foundation (Philadelphia), and Marciano Art Foundation (Los Angeles).
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Works
George Condo Concord, MA, USA, b. 1957
Dismas, 2007Oil on canvas217,9 x 218,4 cm
Framed: 224,5 x 224 cmFurther images
A prime example of Condo’s dramatic intensity, Dismas reveals the artist’s sustained interest in the psychology and symbolic weight of the portrait. Here, Condo revisits one of Western art’s enduring...A prime example of Condo’s dramatic intensity, Dismas reveals the artist’s sustained interest in the psychology and symbolic weight of the portrait. Here, Condo revisits one of Western art’s enduring archetypes — Dismas, the repentant thief crucified alongside Jesus — transforming the familiar religious figure into a character of profound emotional tension. His gaunt face, contorted into a grimace of suffering, conveys the anguish of his fate, while a theatrical beam of light isolates his form against a dense, shadowed backdrop. Removed from narrative context, the biblical outlaw is recast as a fantastical being within Condo’s singular painterly universe.
Emerging as though from darkness, the figure evokes the luminosity and spatial tension of quattrocento frescoes, while the charged contrasts and atmosphere recall the dramatic sensibility of Francisco Goya. His hovering, weightless presence brings to mind Marc Chagall’s floating figures, as well as the raw, elusive bodies from Francis Bacon’s early canvases. Through this constellation of references, Condo forges a compelling synthesis of sacred iconography and contemporary imagination, offering a renewed vision in which the spiritual and the surreal coexist with unsettling harmony.
Exhibitions
'Tatintsian Gallery Selected'. Tatintsian Gallery, Dubai. Nov 14–Dec 30, 2022
BEYOND, me Collectors Room Berlin. Berlin, April - August 2019
Berlin, me Collectors Room Berlin. Wonderful – Humboldt, Krokodil & Polke, Nov 2012–Aug 2013
George Condo: Mental States. Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Jan 2011–May 2012
Lebenslust & Totentanz. Kunsthalle Krems, Krems, Jul–Nov 2010
Christ: The Subjective Nature of Objective Representation. Luhring Augustine, New York, Feb–Mar 2008Publications
Calvin Tomkins, ‘Portraits of Imaginary People: How George Condo reclaimed Old Master painting’, The New Yorker, 9 January 2011
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Tatintsian Gallery Selected
Group Exhibition, Dubai 14 Nov - 30 Dec 2022Tatintsian Selected project opens alongside two Dubai landmark events in fall 2022 – Alserkal Art Week and Dubai Design Week.Read more >
Gallery showroom will spotlight selected works by such contemporary masters as Ron Arad, George Condo, Mat Collishaw, Evgeny Chubarov, Peter Halley, John Miller and Jenny Holzer. -
Naturally Naked
Group Exhibition 15 Aug - 28 Dec 2019Read more > -
Mutated Reality
Group Exhibition 27 Nov 2015 - 2 Mar 2016Read more > -
Persona Grata
Group exhibition 1 Mar - 21 Apr 2010Read more > -
George Condo. Artificial Realism
Personal Exhibition 15 May - 14 Aug 2008Read more > -
Bad Planet
Group Exhibition 15 Apr - 14 May 2008Read more > -
Create Your Own Museum
Group Exhibition 24 Jan - 1 Mar 2007Read more >
PublicationsViewing RoomsNews-
George Condo | The Mad and the Lonely
June 18 – October 31, 2024 | Deste Foundation, Hydra, GreeceThe Mad and the Lonely will showcase small-scale paintings and sculptures from George Condo’s extensive career, focusing on society’s outcasts who oscillate between madness and loneliness. The exhibition blends influences... -
George Condo | Humanoids
March 31 – October 1, 2023 | Nouveau Musée National de MonacoIn George Condo’s own words, “the humanoid is not a science fiction monster, it is a form of representation that uses traditional means to bring out the inner emotions onto... -
George Condo | The Picture Gallery
September 26 – November 28, 2021 | Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, ChinaLong Museum (West Bund) presents the largest solo exhibition by George Condo in Asia, ‘The Picture Gallery.’ This ambitious presentation brings together more than 200 paintings, sculptures and drawings made...
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