George Condo

Courtesy of Hauser & Wirth

Born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957, George Condo studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts 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 Jiří Georg Dokoupil and Walter Dahn.

Condo would soon go on to spend a decade in Europe and returned to New York permanently in 1995, with the birth of his second child. During this period, Condo invented his hallmark “artificial realism” and made his first foray into sculpture. His accolades include the Academy Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999), the Francis J. Greenberger Award (2005), and a New York Studio School honoree (2013), among others. Recently, he was BOMB Magazine’s 2018 Anniversary Gala Honoree.

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, including two Venice Biennales (2013, 2019) and two Whitney Biennials (1987, 2010). In 2017, a retrospective of Condo’s works on paper, “The Way I Think,” traveled internationally from The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.