George Condo

George Condo was born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire. He studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts Lowell for two years before leaving to play in the Boston punk band The Girls alongside the painter Mark Dagley. In 1979 he moved to New York, where he supported himself with a series of odd jobs, most notably as a printer in Andy Warhol's Factory.

Drawn to European art history from the Old Masters through Cubism, Condo spent a year in Los Angeles in 1983 learning Old Master glazing techniques and held his first solo exhibition there at the Ulrike Kantor Gallery. The following year he moved to Germany to work with the Mulheimer Freiheit group, and his first European solo show opened at Monika Sprueth Gallery, featuring his painting The Cloudmaker (1984). In 1985 he moved to Paris, where he lived and worked for a decade before returning to New York in 1995. Condo coined the terms Artificial Realism and Psychological Cubism to describe his approach: invented figures and fragmented portrait heads rendered with the technique of an Old Master. Beyond the art world he is widely known for cover projects including Jack Kerouac's Book of Sketches and Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. He continues to live and work in New York.

Condo is represented by Hauser & Wirth and Spruth Magers. He was the subject of the touring mid-career survey Mental States in 2011 and 2012, which traveled from the New Museum in New York to Rotterdam, London, and Frankfurt, and of the works-on-paper survey The Way I Think, which traveled from the Phillips Collection to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in 2017 and 2018. He has been included in numerous biennials, including Venice in 2019 and the Whitney Biennial in 1987 and 2010. His work is held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Tate Modern, and the Centre Pompidou, among many others.

Condo arrived in the 1980s East Village scene and spent the following decades steadily accruing critical and institutional weight, helped by his own framing of his method as Artificial Realism and Psychological Cubism. The 2011 New Museum survey Mental States was the pivotal moment for his American reputation, presented as a conceptual survey of three decades of work, and it drew a genuinely mixed critical response that is now part of his record: some reviewers found it uneven and faulted the curatorial framing, while others, including Time Out, praised the consistent visual pleasure of the paintings. The broader consensus that has since settled treats Condo as a serious and erudite painter, deeply conversant with the European tradition from the Old Masters through Cubism, who turns that fluency toward invented, grotesque, and comic figures. Major institutions have ratified that view, from the touring works on paper survey The Way I Think to the retrospective at the Musee d'Art Moderne de Paris in 2025 and 2026.

Condo's auction high stands at roughly USD 6.9 million, set by Force Field at Christie's Hong Kong in 2020. What distinguishes his market is not a single towering record but its depth and turnover: with more than a hundred documented repeat sales since the late 1990s, it has more price history, and more liquidity, than almost any living painter of his generation. Recent records have been set by paintings from the early 2010s, and the strongest results have increasingly come from the Hong Kong salerooms, reflecting deep Asian demand for his work.

Within that market, period and the specific body of work matter. The large, brightly colored neo-Cubist figure paintings from around 2010 to 2014 sit at the top of the price range, while works on paper and smaller canvases occupy more accessible tiers.

Condo's market is liquid and broad, which is a genuine advantage, but it also means the name spans a very wide range of work, from multimillion-dollar figure paintings to far more modest drawings and prints, so the specific work, period, and medium drive value far more than the signature alone. There is no catalogue raisonne and no formal authentication practice, so verification runs through the studio and his primary galleries, Hauser & Wirth and Spruth Magers, and provenance and gallery records are the practical backbone of due diligence. A useful tell on the works themselves: Condo typically signs on the face of the canvas and presents finished works in an artist frame, with charcoal works behind plexiglass. Given how actively his work trades, comparable sales are unusually informative here, more so than for the thinner markets of his peers.