George Condo studied Art History at the University of Massachusetts. After a stint as a punk musician in which his band The Girls acted as support for Jean Michel Basquiat's Gray, he settled in Manhattan's East Village in the early 1980s. During this period, he worked in Andy Warhol's Factory where, together with Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, he was instrumental in a return to painting from the 1980s onward. With a figurative style that enabled him to collaborate with writers such as William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, and thinkers like Félix Guattari, he coined the term 'Artificial Realism' to describe his hybridisation of the traditional painting of the European old masters with the sensibility of American Pop art. Using flat colours and a Pop aesthetic, Condo cites as his referents artists such as Velázquez, Picasso, Dalí, Bacon and Pollock. He practises all the pictorial genres: portraits, Vanitas and still-lifes, as well as sculpture. With irony and a certain eroticism, he traces dislocated figures and buffoonish and disturbing beings that question, in a very direct manner, the nature of the human condition.

Condo has exhibited regularly since the 1980s in America and Europe. He has had major retrospectives at the New Museum, New York, 2011, which travelled to the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Hayward Gallery, London, and the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; and at the Phillips Collection, Washington, 2017, which travelled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark. His works are part of numerous museum collections such as MoMA and the Whitney Museum, both in New York; Tate Modern, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and MACBA, Barcelona, among others.