George Condo
George Condo is a contemporary American artist known for his unique figurative paintings and prints. Featuring fractured portraits and aggressive imagery, Condo recontextualizes paintings from the Old Masters with allusions to contemporary American culture, blending their imagery and techniques with aesthetics that echo Pablo Picasso and Willem de Kooning. After a brief stretch working in Andy Warhol's Factory, Condo decamped to Paris in 1985 for a decade. In 2010, Condo collaborated with the musician Kanye West in producing cover art for his album My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. In May of 2013, George Condo had a near-death experience. The American artist was visiting Berlin after finishing a suite of ink drawings. "I guess my immune system was down and was in a weird state of mind. I got triple pneumonia after contracting legionnaires disease.I was hallucinating this guy when I was in the hospital." The guy he means is in the picture called the Wild Man of Borneo (Slide 3). "I didn't know who he was or where he came from. When I came out of the hospital I started looking around for pictures of what I'd seen in my delirium, and I found it was the Wild Man of Borneo, a music hall act."