In a parallel universe, George Condo might be known for music. He’s always played instruments, starting with classical guitar at a young age, then lute, tenor viol (aka viola da gamba), and later holding it down as the bass player of ragtag ‘70s punk band The Girls. On this mortal coil, however, his legacy is cemented not in albums, solos, or preferred Fender models, but rather in acrylic, semi-transparent oil glazes with varnish, and charcoal.

Truthfully, though, the painter really needs no introduction. Condo is walking, talking canon. One of the living greats. An art world monolith whose style can be spotted a mile away — on the walls of storied institutions (in New York alone, he’s in the permanent collections of The Met, MoMA, Guggenheim, and Whitney), on the album covers of records by Travis Scott, Kanye West, and Phish, on Supreme decks, in the bluest of blue chip galleries. Recently, in the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, which in October held the most significant retrospective of Condo’s work to date.

Since emerging from the same downtown New York hothouse that birthed Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring — two of his closest friends and creative peers — the 67-year-old painter has spent four decades building a body of work that’s as restless and hybridized as perfectly executed jazz improvisation. His canvases slide between neo-cubist fragmentation, cartoon grotesque, and tender psychological portraiture without ever lingering in one mode for too long. He’s a master of infinite styles, with multiple often entwining within the very same frame. Condo’s approach to incorporating countless eras of art history into one powerful idea is akin to how a DJ remixes a track — taking, say, a shoegaze classic and editing it with an acid house bassline. He preserves the essence of one genre while adding his own inimitable flavor to create something fresh. As Condo once stated, “You could include five or ten languages from different periods of art simultaneously in your own paintings. And why not — who said you can’t?”

Condo’s technical chops and time-hopping, unabashedly post-modern style allows him to mash high and low brow culture in truly punk fashion, a quality that has allowed his work to resonate with an almost impossibly broad audience. “I remember in the ‘80s somebody said my work was like Rembrandt painting Bugs Bunny,” Condo reflects with a chuckle. “I liked that idea.” This sensibility has also made him one of the most successful players in the art world for decades on end. In 2024, he ranked third among contemporary artists in total auction sales, following only Yoshitomo Nara and Basquiat.

While he can rightfully compare certain aspects of his style to any number of Renaissance greats, Abstract Expressionist icons, or even American Pop Art demigods, Condo would rather relate his art-making to music. He’ll fluently discuss the tempo of a given painting the same way a violinist describes bow technique — the discipline of holding a slow legato mood on a canvas, or the precision required to sprint through a presto-type work. He’ll compare his own painting eras and series — the Artificial Realism works, Psychological Cubism, even his recent Diagonal Paintings — to how Miles Davis and John Coltrane would perform certain standards or songs like “My Funny Valentine” throughout their entire careers, yet iterate on the form time and time again. Condo, too, creates a theme and bends it into boundless variations across dozens of canvases. “I realized what I want to do as a painter is create a kind of motif, and then I just want to improvise on that motif,” he says.

But more importantly, “I want my paintings to sound like Jimi Hendrix’s guitar,” he tells me with his eyebrows raised. “They should have that kind of volume.”

Condo is talking about Hendrix, despite Coltrane’s Live in Sweden playing in the background. We’re sitting in his cavernous studio on the second floor of a massive Gramercy Park townhouse, one of multiple studios he keeps in the city. The ceilings are easily 20 feet high. There’s crown moldings and a fireplace. An adjacent room has its ceiling painted to resemble a blue sky with clouds. It doesn’t look like Condo’s handiwork, but it lends a grandiosity to the space. There are four finished paintings in the main studio room, as well as hundreds of paint tubes, brushes, varnish, you name it. Two of the paintings are 104 x 90 inches, so tall that at one point Condo gets up on a ladder to re-sign one titled The Magician. There’s even an air mattress on the floor, so the painter can take naps in between marathon sessions. It is absolutely the setting in which one would imagine meeting one of the most celebrated artists of the last 40-plus years — a talent still in the throes of his practice and who’s doing anything but resting on his laurels.

Condo pours a glass of 2005 Lucie & Auguste Lignier Clos de la Roche — he’s been working on a painting all morning. It’s nearly 100 degrees and the A/C isn’t working. Or the townhouse is so big, the air is not circulating properly. Either way, he deserves the vintage Pinot Noir. After noticing me pop a Zyn, he generously suggests that I smoke cigarettes while we talk, cheekily offering me a wine glass as an ashtray. He gave up the habit himself years ago, but seeing the smoke plumes drift around the studio gives the hangout a bohemian flair. There’s much to discuss. Condo’s upcoming Paris retrospective is looming, a milestone he describes as a “thrill.” The exhibition will feature roughly 80 paintings, 110 drawings, and 20 sculptures in an attempt to present his “most emblematic works” across four decades. “From the East Village to Paris and back to New York, all my work will all be there. It helps me relive those times and think about all the positive moments of each era.”

Over two hours, our conversation skips through numerous time periods and topics, much like the upcoming museum survey. It’d feel scattershot if Condo didn’t regularly return to the idea of the many ties between music and fine art. Towards the end, I can’t help but notice a core characteristic of how he operates in the world. If Condo’s paintings contain multitudes — comedy, horror, lust, tranquility — it’s because he’s attuned to what people feel but rarely say out loud. Much like a punk frontman or rapper, the results aren’t always polite. They’re not meant to be. They’re meant to hold up off the cuff like the best solos: unexpected, undeniable, and alive in the moment you encounter them.

WHAT ARE SOME OTHER PARALLELS YOU SEE BETWEEN MUSIC AND PAINTING?

Take tempo. When you’re a classical musician, you learn that if you’re playing a slow movement, you have to be just as accurate and delicate and true to the actual soul of what the composer has written as when they’ve suddenly written a piece that’s uptempo or a total presto. Every single note has to be perfect, like playing a jig by Bach. And so when you’re painting, if you’re painting as fast as you possibly can, you still cannot miss a note. If you miss a note, you’re a bad player. I also like the idea of making slow paintings like a legato, as well as uptempo paintings.

WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN LISTENING TO LATELY WHILE IN THE STUDIO?

I was just listening to Miles Davis’ On the Corner over and over again. You’re thrown right into it and it just amplifies. It ignites me into realizing this idea about how music has themes and variations. If you think about the Goldberg Variations and how they’re just motifs stemming from one idea that are twisted and turned a zillion different ways. Or how Miles will take a standard or a song like “Stella by Starlight,” and he’s going to do many versions of it and each will have its own improvisation. Even Coltrane, who played “My Favorite Thing” throughout his entire career, but every single time it sounded different.

I realized what I want to do as a painter is create a kind of motif or theme, and then I just want to improvise on that motif. And so I’d improvise on motifs that I developed in my own sort of internal language — improvise on them so they weren’t standards. I wanted to create what you considered to be almost a standard Condo and then fuck it up and improvise over it. And that way you could get

SO YOU HAVE A FOUNDATIONAL VISUAL VERNACULAR, LIKE YOUR OWN VERSION OF “MY FUNNY VALENTINE” OR “OLEO,” WHETHER IT’S THE ARTIFICIAL REALISM SERIES OR EVEN THE DIAGONAL WORKS. THERE ARE THESE VISUAL TROPES THAT YOU CONTINUE TO ITERATE ON.

Yeah, exactly. Even the Diagonal Paintings, which were a recent development of mine. I thought about the whole history of abstraction, and most of the art was created up and down — Mondrian, Barnett Newman, etc. Rothko did big squares, and Picasso’s Cubism was like going in and out of doors where you could travel through a crack in a painting and get to another open space. But I never really saw anybody do a diagonal thing. So I wanted to go from the top left corner, then down to the right. I’m going to create sort of a wall of color and then I’m going to build a cascade of figures that are part of my language. But I’m going to sort of take them and distort them and integrate them with other images and disassociate them with each other, but make the whole thing uniform somehow. I like this idea of disassociated imagery alongside uniform compositional ideas. I always think in terms of composition, no matter what’s in it.

My Black Paintings were a whole other departure. When I did the Black Paintings, it was interesting because I had to go to the hospital. The doctor said, “I think you’re going to need some stents. And he showed me these black and white printouts that they had taken of veins and arteries or whatever. And I said, can I keep those? They became the basis of the Black Paintings. One of the paintings is called The Heart Attack, and another one’s called Pushed to the Edge. But they were also a premonition of the darkness right before the pandemic, while also referring to the way certain political structures had come in and really marginalized people.

DO YOU THINK THE DICHOTOMY BETWEEN HIGHBROW AND LOWBROW HAS THE SAME RELEVANCE IT ONCE DID? OR IS EVERYTHING NO-BROW IN A POST-INTERNET ART ERA?

Are we talking about transgressive concepts? I once said that I like bad taste and turning it into something of my own. Take the thing that people hate the most and paint it the way the best painters paint something. I remember in the ‘80s somebody said my work was like Rembrandt painting Bugs Bunny. I liked that idea.

I always said it is the painting that decides whether the viewer is good or bad. It’s not the other way around. And if the painting holds up over time and there’s a critical dialogue that can be built around a certain painting, even if people may not have understood it at first, then that is success. I feel there’s still truth to that. That’s why AI and all those kinds of things don’t bother me because it will be the painting that makes the decision, not the people looking at it. All that matters is: Is it any good? Is it going to hold up?

YOU MENTIONED THAT YOU’RE NOT GOING TO MANY NEW EXHIBITIONS OR CONTEMPORARY ART SHOWS. WHY IS THAT?

I didn’t stop embracing new art. I just have so little time. And when you have a granddaughter and you start to think about time a little bit more — how much time you have to live, how many things you’ve already lived through — you have a realization: “I just want to keep painting until I drop dead. I don’t want to waste any time. I don’t want to waste any energy on seeing things unless it’s something I feel like I need to see.” For example, I would need to see a Munch retrospective because I’d want to see Edvard Munch’s work that I haven’t seen before, the stuff that’s been locked up in private collections.

HOW DO YOU STAY UNTETHERED FROM EXPECTATIONS THAT COME WITH SUCH RENOWNED STATUS?

I block it out and keep going for it. I keep looking at making art as if I just started. I always feel like I never got anywhere and I’m still working towards my goal as a painter. And along the way, every time I’ve felt that way, I always made the best painting I could possibly make. I’ve been like that since I was a kid.

In terms of legacy, I’m working on a project with Lee Eastman, who was with Eastman and Eastman. They represent the Bacon estate, de Kooning’s estate, Rothko’s estate. We’re building this kind of George Condo Foundation. And what we want to do, in terms of ensuring the legacy of my work, is to build a database that includes all the articles about my work, images of all the paintings, and all the different perspectives on them from critics. It’ll be a similar system to what universities use. And then there’ll be another level which is more scholarly, including all the writings I’ve ever done on art and other things. That’s something that will be new for the audience. Plus, all the sketchbooks I’ve filled — thousands of them that are full of free drawings like doodles, preparatory drawings, to-do lists, and more. Together, it will give you a picture of what an artist’s life was like. So when I’m dead, people might have a good shot at understanding my lived experience.