George Condo’s paintings, self-defined as “psychological Cubism,” are steeped in the re-examining of the works of the Old Masters mixed with allusions to contemporary American culture. His figurative paintings, fractured portraits and aggressive, sometimes savage imagery,
echo the crude, broken aesthetics of Picasso and de Kooning. Condos’ figures, with their bulging eyes and hideous facial expressions, incite the macabre – his cast of characters reveals humanity’s imperfections that make way for beautiful artistic moments. Born in New Hampshire in 1957, Condo has worked with Andy Warhol and it was Jean-Michel Basquiat who convinced him to move to New York to pursue his art career. Condo has exhibited globally since 1983, and has had two major retrospectives of his work, one show of paintings at the New Museum in New York in 2011 and another show of works on paper at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. in 2017. Condo’s works can be found in the public collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, the Tate Modern, London, the Broad Collection in Los Angeles, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among others.