George Condo at the Musée d’Art Moderne
Paris
03 December 2025
The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is hosting an expansive retrospective of George Condo from 10 October 2025 to 8 February 2026, marking the most ambitious survey of his work to date.
Conceived in close collaboration with Condo himself, the exhibition brings together around 80 paintings, 110 drawings, and about 20 sculptures, drawing on loans from leading institutions such as MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, as well as important private collections.
Rather than following a strictly chronological order, the show organises his oeuvre around three central themes: his dialogue with art history, his treatment of the human figure, and his relationship to abstraction.
Art history and appropriation
The exhibition opens with works that highlight Condo’s deep and fertile engagement with Western art history. In a gallery that evokes a traditional fine-arts museum, Condo’s bold reinterpretations of masters—from Rembrandt to Picasso, Goya, and Rodin—unfold alongside his own exuberant, often unsettling figures.
These paintings show how he borrows from the past even while destabilising it, producing a highly distinctive visual vocabulary.
Artificial Realism
One of the exhibition’s most striking chapters is devoted to a concept Condo calls “Artificial Realism”, in which he collapses time, mixing techniques and styles from the past with modern cultural references.
Here, works inspired by graffiti coexist with cartoon-like imagery, creating a sense of temporal ambiguity. The show also includes his Collages and Combination Paintings (1990–1993), which reinterpret accumulation and contrast in art.
Portraiture and “psychological cubism”
A powerful section of the retrospective explores Condo’s portraits. He often portrays his characters as imaginary, “humanoid” beings, expressing the complexity and fragmentation of the human psyche.
After early‑2000s neoclassical solo portraits, the exhibition presents group works from his Drawing Paintings (2009–2012), and culminates in his Double Portraits (2014–2015). These double figures, Condo explains, reflect his concept of psychological cubism—a means of showing multiple, even conflicting, emotions within a single face.
Abstraction and introspection
The final section delves into Condo’s more abstract work, charting a path from his early Expanding Canvases (mid-1980s), through to his monochrome series: whites (2001), blues (2021), and blacks (1990–2019).
Of particular note is an immersive room dedicated to his Black Paintings, designed to invite contemplation. The exhibition closes with his most recent works—the Diagonal series (2023–24), demonstrating his continual reinvention of his pictorial language.
Through this thematic, non-linear presentation, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris invites visitors to experience George Condo not just as a painter, sculptor, and draftsman, but as a visionary who bridges centuries of art while probing the contradictions of the human spirit.
