George Condo

George Condo is a defining figure of contemporary American painting. Over more than four decades, he has forged a relentlessly inventive path, deploying technical skill and canonical art historical knowledge to channel the painterly modes of American and European art history into works of astonishing originality. Condo synthesizes past pictorial languages and motifs to create, as he has put it, ‘composites of various psychological states painted in different ways.’ Oftentimes, the influence of multiple historical moments can be felt in a single work. Most of Condo’s paintings feature the human figure, these are not portraits of living individuals but are invented characters, captured in ways that reveal their humanity.

Born in Concord, New Hampshire in 1957, Condo lives and works in New York City. He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts in Lowell, where he became particularly inspired by a course on Baroque and Rococo painting. He moved to Boston and played in a punk band, ‘The Girls;’ relocated to New York, where he worked as a printer for Andy Warhol; and spent a year studying Old Master glazing techniques in Los Angeles. During his first trip to Europe in 1983, Condo connected with the anarchic Mülheimer Freiheit group in Cologne which included painters Jiri Georg Dokoupil and Walter Dahn.

Condo would soon go on to spend a decade in Europe: in 1985 he moved to Paris and did not return to New York permanently until 1995, with the birth of his second child. During this period, Condo invented his hallmark ‘artificial realism’ and made his first foray into sculpture. Firmly rooted back in New York, he received his first major award, the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in 1999, followed by the Francis J. Greenberger Award in 2005. Further accolades for this constant innovator would follow: Condo was a 2013 honoree of the New York Studio School alongside writer Musa Mayer and poet Bill Berkson, and BOMB Magazine’s 2018 Anniversary Gala Honoree.

George Condo had his first solo exhibition in 1983 at the Ulrike Kantor Gallery in Los Angeles. Since then, he has presented solo exhibitions at leading institutions including most recently a major retrospective at Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (2025). Further museum exhibitions have been held at Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2023), Long Museum, Shanghai (2021), The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2017), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk (2017), and Staatlich Museen zu Berlin – Museum Berggruen, Berlin (2016). His portraiture was also the focus of two major surveys: ‘Mental States’ (2011–12), which travelled from the New Museum, New York, to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Hayward Gallery, London; and Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; and ‘One Hundred Women. Retrospective’ (2005), presented at the Museum of Modern Art, Salzburg, and Kunsthalle Bielefeld.

In addition to appearing in solo and group exhibitions, Condo’s work has been honored with inclusion in Biennials in the United States and abroad. In 2019 he participated in the 58th Venice Biennale’s ‘May You Live In Interesting Times.’ His work was also exhibited in the Venice Biennale six years prior, in 2013. Other biennials in which Condo has participated include the 13th Biennale de Lyon in 2015, the 10th Gwangju Biennale in 2014, the 2010 and 1987 iterations of the Whitney Biennial, and the 48th Corcoran Biennial in Washington DC in 2005.

Condo’s work can be found in renowned public collections internationally, including: Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo, Norway; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Dakis Joannou Collection Foundation, Athens, Greece; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweeden; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona, Spain; Stedeljik Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Staedel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; The Broad Collection, Los Angeles CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY; The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York NY.