George Condo: Painting Reconfigured
The definitive monograph on George Condo's career from 1984 to 2015, written by art historian and curator Simon Baker working in close collaboration with the artist. This comprehensive 288-page volume combines biographical, chronological, and thematic approaches to survey Condo's outrageous, unorthodox painting practice. With over 250 illustrations, the book includes an introductory essay on Condo's contradictory nature, a chapter exploring his phenomenal early career in the 1980s East Village scene, and three thematic chapters tracing his systematic reconstruction of painting techniques from Abstract Expressionism to Old Master traditions.
Born in 1957 in Concord, New Hampshire, George Condo emerged as a pioneer of Neo-Expressionist revival, coining the term "Psychological Cubism" to describe his approach of representing multiple emotional and psychological states simultaneously within single figures. Unlike classical Cubism's multiple spatial perspectives, Condo's fragmented faces and distorted bodies depict the internal contradictions and psychological complexity of his subjects. His "Artificial Realism" synthesizes Old Master technical precision with American pop culture, cartoon aesthetics, and visceral psychological content—creating what he describes as authentic representations of "the disjointed human psyche."
The volume explores Condo's relationship to abstraction, examining how he alternates between figuration and pure abstraction while maintaining psychological intensity throughout. Baker analyzes the darker dimensions of Condo's iconography—the grotesque faces, violent distortions, and unsettling humor that characterize his portrait subjects. The book traces influences from Velázquez, Goya, and Picasso to de Kooning and Guston, revealing how Condo reconstructs painting history through his distinctive lens. His approach combines technical virtuosity with deliberately crude passages, academic precision with cartoon simplicity, beauty with horror.
Published by Thames & Hudson in hardcover format with 288 pages and over 250 color illustrations. George Condo's work is held in major museum collections including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Corcoran Gallery, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and The Broad. Major retrospectives have been presented at New Museum (2011), Hayward Gallery (2011-2012), and Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris (2025-2026). This monograph represents the most comprehensive study of Condo's painting practice to date.