George Condo, the blue-chip American artist known for grotesque, Cubist-inspired portraits, is now jointly represented by Sprüth Magers and Skarstedt Gallery. The artist will no longer be represented by Hauser & Wirth, whose roster he joined in 2020.
Condo has a history with both of his new galleries: He started working with Sprüth Magers co-founder Monika Sprüth in 1984, and also worked with Skarstedt from 2004 to 2019. Per Skarstedt, founder of his eponymous gallery, said in a statement that he felt “excited to welcome George Condo back to the gallery.”
Born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire, Condo studied at the University of Massachusetts Lowell before moving to Boston. He started his creative career as a musician, playing bass in a band called The Girls alongside Mark Dagley, Daved Hild, and Robin Amos. In 1979, he moved to New York, where he found himself immersed in the East Village art scene.
Condo made his name in the 1980s after gaining early support from New York gallerists Pat Hearn and Barbara Gladstone. His distorted faces captured the decade’s manic energy, establishing a style of what he called “artificial realism.” “I don’t wanna be a representational painter,” he told Avant Art. “I want to paint what I think is on the interior, what’s actually going through their mind as opposed to what they look like.”
Today, at 67, Condo is among the most influential and widely exhibited painters of his generation. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at, among others, the Morgan Library and Museum in 2023, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. in 2017, and, currently, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris. Before departing from Hauser & Wirth, the artist presented a two-venue exhibition with the gallery and Sprüth Magers in New York earlier this year.
