George Condo

George Condo (b. 1957, Concord, New Hampshire) is an American painter who lives and works in New York. He studied at the University of Massachusetts before moving to New York in the late 1970s and then to Paris, where he worked as a typesetter for Andy Warhol's Interview magazine. He later lived and worked in Europe for extended periods.

His practice, which he has described as "Artificial Realism" or "Psychological Cubism," fuses the formal conventions of Old Master portraiture and traditional figure painting with the distorted physiognomy of caricature and the vocabulary of twentieth-century art history — Picasso, Velázquez, Ingres, and Léger are all discernible presences. His figures are frequently composite, combining multiple faces, expressions, or bodily parts into a single unstable physiognomy that projects states of anxiety, comedy, or menace in excess of any single affect. His output spans portraits, multi-figure compositions, and works on paper, produced in oil with considerable technical refinement. He exhibited at Boesky Gallery, Sprüth Magers, and Hauser & Wirth, the latter representing him since the 2000s. A major retrospective, Mental States, was organized by the New Museum in New York in 2011 and traveled internationally. His work is held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Centre Pompidou, and many major private and public collections.