Collection: George Condo

George Condo (born 1957, Concord, New Hampshire) is an American painter whose work occupies a singular position between the history of European painting and the vernacular of American popular culture. Condo studied music before turning to painting in the early 1980s, and his practice has since developed a vocabulary of distorted, hybridised figures — part Old Master portrait, part cartoon, part psychological projection — rendered with a technical facility that makes the grotesque appear entirely at home within the conventions of Western art.

Condo coined the term ‘artificial realism’ to describe a mode of painting that combines the stylistic registers of different historical periods and genres within a single canvas: a Velázquez pose inhabited by a Looney Tunes face; a Cubist fragmentation applied to a society portrait. The work is simultaneously learned and absurdist, and its comedy is inseparable from its unease.

Condo has exhibited internationally with Hauser & Wirth and Simon Lee Gallery, and his collaborations extend across literature and music — most notably his illustrated edition of William S. Burroughs’s Ghost of Chance (1991), published by the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Publications produced in connection with his practice — catalogues, artist books, and printed matter — document a body of work that has grown steadily in institutional and critical standing over four decades.