As part of the wild art scene in New York in the early 1980s, George Condo was close to painters such as Basquiat and Keith Haring and worked at Warhol's Factory applying diamond dust to silkscreen. At the same time, he found his way to his own artistic expression, which he describes as "artificial realism".
Condo (born in 1957) mixes input from art history's masters – such as Velazquez, Manet and Picasso – with elements of American Pop Art. He distorts and renews this material so that it stands out and becomes his own: a kind of strange hybrids that blur boundaries between the comic and the tragic, the grotesque and the beautiful, the classic and the innovative. His works are inventive, amusing and sometimes macabre.