George Condo may well be best remembered for being the artist whose cover art for Kanye West’s My Dark Twisted Fantasy was almost censored, as Wal Mart allegedly threatened not to sell the album depicting a man resembling West with a naked phoenix. (As a result, five covers by Condo – including the controversial image – were included in the album’s packaging, allowing you to slide your favourite into a window on the album’s cover). This polemical image is in the same style that has led Condo to become one of the most sought-after artists of the 21st century. Ironically, the fearlessness that makes his work so sought after in the art market is the very thing that has led to his seemingly fraught encounter with the music industry.
Condo was born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957, and now lives and works in New York City. His work channels his self-confessed heroes, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. This can be seen in the way his contorted subjects merge with his love of contemporary culture, transforming them into paintings with a highly idiosyncratic vocabulary that is always lusty and independent. Condo himself has said simply of his work’s style that "It’s just a way to paint, to extend the lifespan of painting".
Condo may never have met Picasso but he did work for Warhol, pasting the diamonds onto the diamond dust works and learning from the master himself the importance of breaking down the boundaries between high and low culture. Condo’s work has a technical facility learnt from careful scrutiny of the master Picasso, fused with a comic book style not far from popular street culture. It is not surprising therefore that Condo has already collaborated with several celebrities, the majority of whom are musicians.
Condo studied music at university and is himself still a practicing lutenist, although he admits that he is spending less time playing as he busily paints towards his forthcoming retrospective at the New Museum in New York in January 2011 (and then travelling to Europe). He was featured recently in two exhibitions of the Whitney Museum of American Art at the same time – on one floor, in Francesco Bonami’s recent 2010 Whitney Biennale, and on another in the exhibition Collecting Biennials. In doing so, Condo demonstrated his versatility with, for Bonami, one of his most abstracted paintings to date, and, for the other show, with his sculpture The Butcher and his Wife – an imposing, muscular bronze sculpture with the figures posed in flagrante, their cartoon faces not reflecting the meat cleaver embedded in the man’s head.
 
Karen Wright