George Condo
Old Master technique in the service of faces that have come apart.
George Condo was born in New Hampshire in 1957, studied music theory and art history, briefly worked in Andy Warhol's Factory printing Myths, and spent the 1980s in Cologne and Paris studying European painting seriously. He calls what he does Artificial Realism and Psychological Cubism: portraits painted with the surface, glazing and confidence of the Old Masters, of figures whose faces have been pulled into several conflicting expressions at once — bulging eyes, bared teeth, cheeks displaced. He collaborated with Jean-Michel Basquiat and William Burroughs, and designed the cover of Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010.
The painting market is led by the large multi-figure canvases and the single portrait heads of the 2000s onwards, with the black-and-white and drawing-based works forming a distinct and more accessible tier. Condo draws constantly and the works on paper — pastel, crayon, ink, often on a coloured ground — are numerous and are frequently the strongest value in the output. There is a modest print market. Because he reworks canvases over long periods, dates on the reverse sometimes span years, and that is original rather than a sign of alteration.
If you own a work by George Condo
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