George Condo: Biography & Artwork

George
Condo

With a penchant for the grotesque and distorted, American artist George Condo combines contemporary culture with art historical tradition. To buy or sell prints and editions from Condo's portfolio browse available artwork from our network and enquire today. Contact us for complimentary market advice and free valuations on any print, with zero obligation to sell.

Biography

Carnivalesque, imaginative and utterly unique, George Condo is a key figure in American contemporary art, best known for his distorted portraits. Condo’s art combines his reverence for the works of Velázquez, Picasso, and Francis Bacon with bold references to pop culture, Disney, graffiti, and Surrealism and creates a distinct and entirely original aesthetic.

Born in 1957, in New Hampshire, Condo attended the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, studying Music Theory and Art History. Two years after graduating, Condo moved to Boston and began work with a silkscreen shop. In Boston, his career began with music. He joined the punk band The Girls with abstract painter Mark Dagley; and through this met legendary Jean-Michel Basquiat, who encouraged Condo to explore the emotive potential of art and eventually inspired the young Condo to move to New York and pursue an artistic path.

Condo’s career, and his ensuing success, began in the early 1980s, when he began showing his work in New York East Village galleries, and has since never faded. During these years, the artist coined the term ‘Artificial Realism,’ to refer to his oeuvre, defining it as the distinctive hybrid-merging of Old Master portraiture with American Pop elements.

In 1983, Condo moved to LA for a short period, where he had his first solo exhibition with the Ulrike Kantor Gallery, which was followed by a long, highly successful period spent in Europe. His first solo presentation in Europe was in Germany in 1984, at the Monika Sprueth Gallery, which featured what is perhaps his most well-known piece: The Cloudmaker (1984).

During his travels in Europe, Condo started working with art dealer and gallerist Barbara Gladstone, and had two exhibitions in New York in 1984 with Gladstone Gallery and Pat Hearn Gallery. He also met and became life-long friends with Keith Haring, painting one of his most beloved works, Dancing to Miles (1985), in Haring’s New York studio. The latter was included as part of the 1987 Whitney Biennial and is now kept in the Broad Foundation collection in LA.

Despite his institutional success, Condo’s work is also accessible to the public in the form of book covers, album artworks, or collaborative bodies of work. In its most famous instance, in 2010, Condo created a work to feature on the album cover of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The image depicted a morbid, frightful, and aggressive caricature of the artist with a female phoenix across his lap and was so grotesque and disturbing that it was subsequently banned by iTunes.

When he made the move to New York, Condo worked at Andy Warhol’s factory, helping to add gold dust to Warhol’s Myths series, during which time he was engulfed in the vibrant scene of the city. Condo himself cites the Old Masters as his greatest influences, including Diego Velázquez, Neoclassicists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, and Pablo Picasso himself. The merging of the delirious abstract expressionism of his contemporaries, with this deep respect for classicists, forms one of the most recognisable aspects of Condo’s work. Friendships made throughout Condo’s career also shaped the direction of his art; the likes of Keith Haring and William S. Burroughs gave Condo room for further artistic experimentation.
Condo’s work has been exhibited around the globe in many renowned international museums and galleries, including George Condo: One Hundred Women at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg and Kunsthalle Bielefeld in 2005, and George Condo: The Lost Civilization at the Musee Maillol in Paris. The latter also featured a reprint of Guattari’s text from Condo’s Galerie Daniel Templon exhibition in 1990. A retrospective, entitled Mental States, was held at the New Museum in New York, in 2011, and has since travelled to the Netherlands, Germany, and London. Many pieces are now housed in permanent collections at the Whitney Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum, MoMA, and many more. As a formidable and inspiring figure in the art world, Condo has been invited to lecture at major academic institutions, including Harvard, Columbia, and Yale.