George Condo

Born to a nurse and a physics teacher in 1957’s Concord, New Hampshire, George Condo has been of the most in-demand painters since the 80s. In his college years at University of Massachusetts, he studied art history and music theory. He has gone on to use fully use both throughout his life.

He was a member of the band, The Girls, when he first met Jean-Michel Basquiat. Basquait urged him to move to New York to further his art career. He followed this advice and began having his work shown by East Village art galleries. He drew on his art history background and, in his quest to find his first important statement to make, decided to remake work of the Old Masters, something he was fond of. These remakes include that of Goya (Impressions of Goya 3, 2016), Caravaggio, Joan Miró (The Black Insect, 1986), and Rembrandt. Like this span of artists, Condo’s work is known for spanning genres, drawing on aesthetics from Pop to Surrealism to Cubism.

He is self-defined as a psychological cubist. Absorbing influence from Picasso’s singular representations of multitudes of physical perspectives, Condo focuses on the same idea just, instead of the tangible, the psychological. The musicality began in his youth is reflected in his works with the meshing and harmonizing of lines, colors and aesthetics. It is also honored in perhaps his most mainstream work to date: the cover art of Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (2010).