Over the past forty years, George Condo has brought into being a multitude of bizarre characters, ranging from the mildly psychotic to the dangerously deranged. In the early 1980s, he started painting “fake Old Masters”, creating delinquent images that looked genuinely historical but had a “modern edge”. During a decade in Paris from the mid-1980s, he invented “Artificial Realism”, which involved “dismantling one reality and constructing another from the same parts”. Returning to New York in 1995, he responded to America’s boom and bust years in paintings that reflect a manic society: its ambitions, hysteria, paranoia and despair.
