Woman with Designer shirt
George Condo
An arresting example from George Condo’s celebrated oeuvre, ‘Woman with Designer Shirt’ (2026) exemplifies the artist’s sustained engagement with portraiture. Blurring abstraction and figuration, the familiar and the surreal, the piece testifies to Condo’s remarkable ability to capture the discordant complexities of the human mind.
In ‘Woman with Designer Shirt’, the figure’s mismatched eyes and disjointed features impede any straightforward understanding of her expression, suggesting an explosive psychological complexity that cannot be contained within a single image. An outstanding example of Condo’s fantastical portraits, the work showcases the achievements of his remarkable artistic practice: producing images that are at once strange and familiar, experimental and timeless, yet bracingly unique.
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George Condo
Woman with Designer Shirt
- 2026
- Oil on linen
- 190.5 x 152.4 cm / 75 x 60 in
George Condo’s ‘Woman with Designer shirt’ will be presented by the gallery at Art Basel Paris 2026.
‘I think the most consistent thing in my work is the idea of humanity – of finding a way to represent human consciousness through portraiture, so that the image conveys not only the subject’s outward appearance, but also what’s going through their mind, and the emotional states occurring to and within them’
George Condo[1]
About the Artist
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.
Artwork: George Condo, Woman with Designer shirt (detail), 2026 © George Condo. Photo: Roger Edwards
Portrait: George Condo in his studio, 2026. Courtesy Condo Studios
[1] George Condo, ‘George Condo. The Way I Think’, Louisiana Channel, November 7, 2017, online.