George Condo

b. 1957, Concord, New Hampshire, US

Invented characters with bulging eyes, asymmetrical faces with comical expressions, and bizarre bodies populate Condo’s work, which pays tribute to Old Master portraiture while nodding to the ambition and hysteria of contemporary American society. He has collapsed hierarchies between painting and drawing, the beautiful and the grotesque, and the comic and the tragic. His hallmark approach, ‘artificial realism’, involves ‘dismantling one reality and constructing another from the same parts’. He recently unveiled his first major public sculpture at New York’s Lincoln Center Plaza; titled Constellation of Voices, it evokes both a sun god and a lowly street performer, splendour and anxiety wrapped into one.