George Condo U.S.A, 1957
'I am defining realism as that which is external to us, independent of our perception. We can't see it, but it's really there. So then I went and thought about this artificial realism phenomenon, and turned it into a reality. It was almost as if an equation I had created became the world we live in today.' - George Condo
George Condo might best be described as a painter of the interior architecture of human consciousness. Rather than depicting the external world, he gives form to psychological states, with a kind of immediacy that recalls jazz improvisation. His art brings together the technical discipline of Old Master portraiture with the fractured, unstable syntax of contemporary life, resulting in what he has termed ‘Artificial Realism’: the realistic depiction of what is, in essence, artificial.
Artificial realism is the realistic representation of that which is artificial. To me, artificial realism is a realistic representation of life as it is. It's the subject I'm representing that is artificial, where you could define 'artificial' as man-made. - George Condo
The artist works not from observation but from the mind’s eye, allowing images to move directly from consciousness to canvas. He applies oil paint with a speed and intensity that registers the instability and plurality of emotional experience. His figures—grotesque yet profoundly human, with bulbous, distorted features—embody a state of simultaneity: joy and dread, elegance and vulgarity, poise and disintegration cohabit within a single form. This is the essence of what Condo calls ‘Psychological Cubism’.
Extending Picasso’s spatial revolution into the realm of the psyche, he does not so much present multiple viewpoints of an object as expose the layered and often conflicting emotional states a person may inhabit at once.
Born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire, George Condo studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, where he developed a particular fascination with Baroque and Rococo painting. His father, scientifically inclined and interested in the problems of three-dimensional representation, also impressed upon him the notion that one must first master Bach before playing rock and roll. This insistence on rigorous foundations before innovation underpins Condo’s entire artistic approach.
After two years at university, Condo moved to Boston, supporting himself by working in a silk-screen shop while playing bass in the proto-synth-punk band The Girls. By the late 1970s, he had relocated to New York’s East Village, becoming an integral presence in the city’s emerging downtown art scene. A formative period working at Andy Warhol’s Factory in the early 1980s exposed him directly to Pop’s strategies of repetition, mediation and image circulation.
In 1985, Condo settled in Paris, where he spent a decade refining his distinctive pictorial language. Europe proved especially receptive to his bold synthesis of so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural idioms, and it was there that his mature style fully crystallised. He now lives and works in New York, maintaining a disciplined daily studio practice driven by what he describes as the necessity of ‘immediate transmission’—catching images as they surface in the mind and committing them to canvas before they dissolve.
Within the landscape of contemporary painting, Condo occupies a singular and highly influential position. The New York Times has described him as ‘the missing link’ between the figurative traditions of Rembrandt, Picasso and Francis Bacon, and a younger generation of painters including John Currin, Glenn Brown and Dana Schutz. His work emerged in tandem with the Neo-Expressionist resurgence of the 1980s, yet distinguished itself through an attitude to art history that, as curator Laura Hoptman has observed, ‘opened the door for artists to use the history of painting in a way that was not appropriation’.
Where many of his contemporaries turned to quotation, pastiche or parody, Condo developed a methodology of reconstruction. He does not simply borrow historical motifs, but rather places distinct painterly languages—the chiaroscuro of Rembrandt, the chromatic sensibility of Rothko, the gestural force of De Kooning—into active, and often volatile, dialogue within a single composition. In doing so, he tests and unsettles hierarchies between high and low culture. Classical European refinement is brought into collision with the anarchic distortions of cartoon and comic-strip imagery, producing a visual field in which no one register is allowed to remain stable or unchallenged.
This fluid interchange of visual idioms, combined with an unflinching engagement with the complexities—and frequently the absurdities—of human psychology, has secured Condo’s place as one of the most consequential painters of his generation. His work is represented in major museum collections internationally and continues to inform ongoing debates around the status and possibilities of figuration in contemporary art.
