There’s something about George Condo’s art—conceptually sharp, visually electric, but also disconcerting and at times shocking—that has cemented his place as one of the most sought-after artists today. Coveted by collectors, fueling endless waiting lists, and commanding ever-soaring prices, his work has become both an aesthetic and market force. Known for his overtly cartoonish yet tridimensional and still realistic characters that freely riff on art historical references, Condo’s style has undergone an evolution over the years. What began as a sharp, playful engagement with figuration has since expanded into a more expressive approach, where he freely blends elements of figuration and abstraction. His signature fractured compositions reassemble geometric fragments into distorted human figures.
Throughout his oeuvre, Condo has maintained a constant, relentless exploration of the human condition, investigating the tensions and contradictions that emerge from the interplay between the complexities of minds, emotions and the subconscious while translating contemporary life’s deep tensions and anxieties. His paintings have always carried a sharp edge of humor and the grotesque: a tragicomic theatricality that amplifies the absurdity of contemporary existence. His characters resemble masks in a surreal comedy, exaggerated yet instantly recognizable, embodying a world where hyper-connectivity paradoxically breeds isolation. This psychological exasperation—a collision of presence and alienation—is the beating heart of his work.
To mark the opening of his two-part exhibition at Sprüth Magers and Hauser & Wirth, “Pastels,” Observer sat down with Condo to discuss the evolution of his artistic practice—how it has consciously transformed over the years, the motivations that continue to drive him and how, with time, he has come to better understand the deeper impulses that push him to create.
Focusing on his pastel works, both exhibitions offer an opportunity to dive into George Condo’s artistic process, revealing how spontaneous improvisation—through signs, gestures and raw mark-making—fuels his unbounded experimentation with different idioms and canons of contemporary art history. At the same time, the density of these compositions—the layering, the juxtapositions, the clashing chromatic waves—underscores how, for Condo, these works function as a stage to interrogate whether it is still possible to depict the human figure in an era defined by relentless upheaval. Rapid change, global crises and a pervasive sense of uncertainty are reshaping human experience into a landscape as fraught with peril as it is brimming with possibility.
It’s no surprise, then, that Condo’s figures are profoundly fractured, their very sense of identity seemingly shattered. As if something essential within them—something existential—has been irreparably broken. Speaking at the Hauser & Wirth press preview, Condo explained that his figures reflect our collective struggle with fundamental questions: Where are we as a species? What is happening to this world? What is our role in all this? “It’s the humanity in some sort that is represented—or better, its dehumanization in the marginalization of personal beliefs,” he states.
For Condo, the expressive immediacy of pastel allows for greater artistic freedom—an escape from both social and subconscious constraints. His unapologetically disruptive style is, above all, an act of resistance against what he sees as an increasingly suppressive world. Between devastation, uncertainty and extreme political polarization, he argues that society is not only restricting the space for expression but actively discouraging people from taking any position or confronting essential questions, limiting the possibility of self-actualization. Condo insists that art remains one of the last realms where human nature can fully, unfilteredly, assert itself.
That’s why, for him, the rapidity of the gesture is key to channeling the world around him without mediation or restraint. “It’s like automatic writing. It’s a little bit like when I read about the methods that Jack Kerouac used to write his novels—an uninterrupted flow from beginning to end,” Condo says when asked whether his practice functions as a psychological transfer, a process through which subconscious images and sensations surge onto the surface, driven by an irrepressible internal force. “I just attack the canvas as if I’m a boxer,” he adds, noting his appreciation for how sports unfold unscripted, unpredictable and raw. That, to him, is how art should be—”unedited,” as he puts it, a means of manifesting something far deeper about who we are, both as individuals and as a collective.
His art-making process, as he describes it, is more like a “dream of consciousness”—an unconscious, almost accidental search for human expressions that emerge from the chaotic abstraction. “Even if I try to move away from the figure, the parts and pieces and elements just suddenly demand of me that I add an eye and then another eye and then some teeth and an expression comes out of the abstraction,” Condo tells Observer. “It’s like the figures wanting to be seen and wanting to be known.” His latest works, then, have been a full attempt to let these figures reach what he calls “self-actualization”—the figure itself tells him what to do. “I want them to express themselves without being inhabited by the artist.”
This extreme desire to liberate his figures—not just from the weight of art historical tradition but from the internalized rules and biases of their creator—marks a radical shift in Condo’s practice, one that harkens back to his early days in the East Village art scene of the 1980s, alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Back then, his work was still deeply rooted in formal and conceptual ties to the great artistic traditions. His paintings played with the iconography and stylistic language of Old Masters like Goya and Rembrandt, absorbing their techniques but infusing them with a contemporary edge, an unsettling ambiguity drawn from Surrealism, and a bold color sensibility influenced by postwar abstraction and Pop Art. His so-called “Artificial Realism”—or what he referred to as “dimensional plastic” characters—was an intricate fusion of surreal distortion and hyper-polished technique, a “realistic representation of that which is artificial.” Yet, despite its playfulness, it was bound by a rigorous adherence to classical principles of composition, color and light.
At some point, however, the raw reality of contemporary existence irrupted into these staged, illusory scenes, collapsing them under their own weight. Condo was pushed to confront the real essence of the world and society surrounding him and search for a more authentic expression. “I decided that I wanted to set them free: I wanted them to disengage from the self, the George Condo that everybody thought I was. I wanted to disengage from that art, and I wanted to dismantle it. I wanted to take my own art as a subject for dismantling,” he tells Observer. “I didn’t want to dismantle Renaissance painting anymore. I didn’t want to dismantle 19th-century painting anymore. I wanted to dismantle myself and reconstruct it into something else. I didn’t want to deconstruct as Picasso did; I wanted to reconstruct things differently and more genuinely.”
In a way, this shift mirrors the broader disillusionment that defined postmodern sensibilities in the 1980s. Condo’s approach became one of radical self-deconstruction—freeing not just his art from history but freeing himself from his own style. He adopted a more diverse and expressive approach, confronting the complexities of contemporary existence while questioning every established norm, reshaping them on his own terms.
Yet, even as he dismantles, Condo remains deeply engaged with the masters. During his talk, he referenced a lineage that runs from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s immediacy with pastels to Edgar Degas’ vibrant use of color. His work still studies, absorbs and reinvents. But as he explains, “The systematic approach to compositional and color aspects can be somewhat destroyed, and you can go into it and fight yourself.”
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His work still draws on a collective understanding of how to make a painting. But within that structure, Condo carefully stages each piece, manipulating and adjusting the composition after the initial intuitive flow. He pulls in and out of tones and layers, heightening the frenetic, paradoxical and fractured cacophony of contemporary life. This tension—between composition and chaos, tradition and unrestrained expression—encapsulates the internal and external conflicts that define his work. “You have an assault, an internal battle, and go against your own intuitions and your own initial feelings,” he says.
In “Pastels,” his figures seem to burst with almost volatile physical energy, free to manifest their contradictions on the canvas. Yet, even in this seeming disorder, Condo maintains compositional attention to the scene when he manipulates it. He likens his process to psychiatry, treating his subjects as if they were patients. “I act as a sort of psychiatrist: I’ve got to put them back together again in their image of the self, to let them feel as if they can live as themselves in the real world.”
Condo embarks on an ambitious psychological excavation—one that tries to map not just his own mind but the broader collective psyche. His paintings wrestle with inner turmoil, anxieties and subconscious complexities, yet they remain rooted in external reality. Images he absorbs from everyday life—things he’s seen on TV, read in passing—resurface in his compositions, merging and morphing into their symbolic and archetypal forms. “I am sort of photographic in my mind to a certain degree,” he explains. “So all of the references are faces and things, whether it’s animal fights or if I watch lions versus hyenas. I look at the expressions on their faces, they’re so intense, and I transfer those kinds of animalistic references into the human form.”
The transpersonal nature of Condo’s art stems from this liminal space where personal and collective subconscious converge. “It’s a kind of transference of these inner feelings I have about humanity,” he explains. “I think that they mostly represent what goes on in my mind as an empathetic relation and reaction to what’s going on in the world.” His work reflects the deep unease of watching things spiral out of control. “I can see where everything’s going off the rails, and this does disturb me deeply. I don’t like to focus on it so much, but I can’t help but for it to come out in my art.”
The result is what critics have termed “psychological cubism,” a style in which Condo captures the simultaneous, often contradictory nature of human emotions within a single portrait. More than anything, he is attempting to give form to the “fragmented consciousness” that defines our era—perhaps even more so than in the early days of modernity, when this notion first emerged. A series of historical, societal and existential traumas—the collapse of the Western paradigm of progress, the decline of organized religion—have left humanity in a state of dissociation and disconnection, fracturing the perception of self even as technology bombards us with constant connectivity. What remains is an unresolved conflict between societal roles, political and economic structures, and the deeply personal realm of memory, emotion and identity.
“You know, right now, the paintings I’m making are a place where we are, and we are not where we want to be,” Condo reflects. His art embodies this conflict, this chaos—it is a raw testament to the fractured experience of our time. Yet, as Condo tells Observer, he remains convinced that art’s ultimate role is not merely to document reality but to liberate the mind from it. “The role of art is to liberate the mind from reality and to give it a window, yeah, into the possibilities of what a world can be.”
For some, this might come as a surprise. But given all he has explored, perhaps it is inevitable: George Condo, in the end, hopes his art can achieve the same sense of peaceful harmony found in Monet’s paintings. “I would love to live in a Monet painting. It would be so beautiful,” he muses. “I hope I’m going to grow into that kind of painter who can create a place where people want to live.”
Maybe, at some point, we will see Condo shift toward a more symphonic, abstract rhythm in his marks and colors—something already hinted at in the new black-and-white pastels at Sprüth Magers. These works, with their intentional drips and pigment spatters arranged like musical constellations, suggest a deeper order beneath the apparent randomness of the cosmos. In the fluid interplay of signs and the fractures of geometry, Condo gestures toward something beyond destruction—toward the primal forces from which all life emerges.
George Condo “Pastels” is on view at Sprüth Magers through March 1 and Hauser & Wirth Wooster Street through April 12
