27 Facts About George Condo

George Condo was born on 1957 and is an American visual artist who works in painting, drawing, sculpture and printmaking.

George Condo studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

When he emerged in the East Village art scene in the early 1980s, George Condo coined the term Artificial Realism, "the realistic representation of that which is artificial", to describe his hybridization of traditional European Old Master painting with a sensibility informed by American pop.

George Condo's work has influenced many artists of his and the subsequent generation, including Nigel Cooke, Sean Landers, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Glenn Brown.

George Condo moved briefly to Los Angeles and had his first solo exhibition there in 1983 at Ulrike Kantor Gallery.

George Condo moved to Cologne, Germany, where he met and worked with several artists from the Mulheimer Freiheit group, including Walter Dahn and Jiri Georg Dokoupil.

Already close friends with Basquiat by this time, George Condo met Keith Haring on returning to New York, and the two remained lifelong friends until Haring's death from AIDS in 1990.

Between 1985 and 1995 George Condo lived and worked mostly in hotels and rented studios between Paris and New York, while continuing to exhibit extensively in the United States and Europe.

Guattari wrote extensively on George Condo's work, including an introductory text and interview in the exhibition catalogue for George Condo's 1990 solo exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon.

American fiction writer David Means used a George Condo painting, The Fallen Butler, as inspiration for his short story "The Butler's Lament", which appears in the catalogue for the exhibition Mental States, a mid-career survey of the artist's paintings and sculptures organized by the Hayward Gallery, London, and the New Museum, New York, in 2011.

Kanye West used to use a George Condo painting as his Twitter image, and George Condo has painted a Hermes Birkin Bag for West that West gave to Kim Kardashian.

George Condo produced four alternate copies of the album cover that, although not included on the actual cover of the record, came included with certain productions of the record on vinyl and as individual posters.

That same year, George Condo released a t-shirt with Adam Kimmel for Barneys New York.

George Condo's work has been featured on the covers of the Phish album The Story of the Ghost, Danny Elfman's Serenada Schizophrana, and Franck Debussy Schumann by Dora Schwarzberg and Martha Argerich, among others.

In 2020, George Condo collaborated with rapper Travis Scott and created the artwork for Scott's single "Franchise".

In 2009 the Musee Maillol, Paris, organized the exhibition George Condo: The Lost Civilization featuring paintings, drawings, and sculpture created between 2003 and 2008.

In 2011, the New Museum in New York City opened a mid-career retrospective of George Condo's work titled Mental States.

George Condo's work is in the permanent collections of several New York museums, namely the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, and the Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, among other American and European museums and public collections.

In 2000, George Condo was the subject of the documentary film George Condo Painting, directed by John McNaughton.

The film, which follows the progress of Condo's large-scale oil painting Big Red over the course of one year, features an appearance by Allen Ginsberg, as well as footage of Condo collaborating with William S Burroughs on paintings the two made together at Burroughs' Kansas home in the mid-1990s.

In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2005 he received the Francis J Greenburger Award.

George Condo has been invited to lecture at many prestigious institutions including Columbia University, Yale University, Pasadena Art Center, San Francisco MOMA, the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the New Museum, New York.

In 2004, George Condo taught a six-month course at Harvard University entitled Painting Memory.

George Condo has been showing with Spruth Magers since 1984, Simon Lee since 1998, Skarstedt since 2005, and Xavier Hufkens since 2006.

In January 2020, George Condo signed on exclusively with Hauser and Wirth and Spruth Magers.

George Condo's painting Force Field set his auction record of $6.85 million at Christie's Hong Kong in July 2020.

Ahead of the 2024 United States presidential election, George Condo was one of 165 leading contemporary artists who contributed pieces to Artists for Kamala, an online sale with all proceeds raised going directly to the Kamala Harris campaign.