George Condo (b. Concord, New Hampshire, 1957) calls his fractured, multi-expressive portraits "psychological cubism": faces and figures in which several incompatible emotional states, comic and violent, aristocratic and abject, coexist within a single head, as though Cubism's multiple viewpoints had been redirected from physical space to psychological state.

Condo studied art history and music theory at the University of Massachusetts Lowell before moving to Boston and then, in 1979, to New York, where he worked briefly in Andy Warhol's Factory and exhibited throughout the East Village. In 1985 he relocated to Paris for a decade, a period that sharpened the philosophical ambitions of his work: he befriended the philosopher Félix Guattari, who contributed an essay to the catalogue of Condo's 1990 exhibition at Galerie Daniel Templon, and collaborated with the writer William S. Burroughs on paintings, drawings, and etchings, a partnership documented in the Whitney Museum's 1991 publication Ghost of Chance.