George Condo (b. 1957) is an American contemporary artist whose work has placed him among the most distinctive and influential painters of his generation. Born in Concord, New Hampshire, he studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts Lowell before moving to New York in the early 1980s, where he became part of the vibrant East Village art scene alongside artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He worked briefly at Andy Warhol's Factory as a silkscreen printer, an experience that placed him directly within the lineage of American Pop art even as he was developing his own very different approach to painting.

Condo coined the term "Artificial Realism" to describe his work, which combines the technical sophistication of European Old Master painting with grotesque, cartoon-like distortions of the human figure. His portraits, populated by what he calls his "imaginary characters," draw freely from Velázquez, Rembrandt, Picasso, and de Kooning while pushing toward a psychological intensity that is unmistakably his own. The result is a body of work that holds together the comic, the unsettling, and the genuinely beautiful within a single painterly tradition.

Condo has produced book illustrations with literary figures including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, and he reached an unusually wide audience with his cover art for Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy in 2010. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, the Met, the Tate, and other major institutions, and a substantial retrospective at the New Museum in 2011 confirmed his standing as a central figure in contemporary American painting.