After over 30 years of collecting, Anna Condo, the ex-wife of artworld darling George, is consigning 27 paintings, sculptures and works on paper to Christie’s New York this May. The works will be offered as a dedicated single-owner session during Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale on 21 May at Rockefeller Centre, the final live auction of Spring Marquee Week.
All 27 lots are by Condo, the American painter, whose fractured figuration and gleeful trafficking between high art history and psychological disturbance have made him one of the most consistently selling artists of his generation. Anna Condo, a multidisciplinary artist born in Armenia and raised in France, was married to George from 1989 through 2017. What she is selling, in effect, is a portrait of nearly three decades, alongside that of one of contemporary art’s most singular minds.
“There is a deep dialogue with art history,” she has said, “but not in a nostalgic way, rather through constant reinvention, shaped by his own psyche.” – Anna Condo
The collection spans a substantial period of Condo’s output and reads, in Anna’s own words, as a map of emotional and stylistic development. “In the earlier works, you feel a certain rawness, an urgency, loud and youthful, almost rock star in spirit,” she has said. “As time went on, the works became more deliberate, more mature.” That arc is visible across the 27 lots, which move from the frenetic energy of his earlier canvases toward the harder-won authority of his later work. For buyers, the appeal is obvious. A collection of this coherence and biographical density rarely surfaces at auction.
George Condo and Anna Condo Photo: Lindsay Brice Courtesy Christie’s
All 27 lots are by Condo. Among the highlights is a large-scale painting from 2001 that Anna describes as a close approximation of a modern-day Lautrec cabaret scene, a work whose musicality she compares to jazz improvisation, with everything shifting but nothing falling apart. Another work, an acrylic and pastel on paper, prompts a quieter response. “It makes me think of Picasso’s women,” she has said, “somewhere between sleeping and reading, suspended in a moment.” The sculptural standout is Rodrigo and the Maid from 2008, which carries its own weight of personal association. Anna recalls that in the early years of their relationship in France, George was already working in bronze and would take her to the Clementi foundry in Meudon. The work represents a significant moment in his sculptural development while, as she describes, carrying a particularly visceral New York narrative.
The biographical context here is not incidental. Anna Condo’s own formation as an artist gives her account of George’s practice an authority that a collector of a more conventional background could not bring to it. Trained in music, dance, visual art, theatre, and performance, including seven years at a music conservatory, she came into the relationship already fluent in the demands of artistic life.
The two met in Paris in 1988, first at a cafe and then months later at a nightclub, and their relationship immediately placed them at the centre of one of the most vivid moments in recent cultural history. An early trip together to Montauk included a visit to Julian Schnabel at Andy Warhol’s former compound. Allen Ginsberg became a close friend following a dinner hosted by Francesco Clemente. Keith Haring was, by Anna’s account, someone she loved deeply, a figure defined in her memory by an immediacy and generosity of spirit that were completely open and free.
George Condo, Untitled (2001). Photo courtesy of Christie’s Images Ltd 2026.
Anna has spoken about what it means to share a life with another artist, describing how it becomes impossible not to be shaped by it, the shared sensibilities, the particular way of seeing things, and the exposure to a creative drive that places art above almost everything else. Her reflections on watching George work carry the ring of genuine observation rather than retrospective myth-making.
Whether the market responds to that narrative with corresponding enthusiasm will become clear on 21 May. Condo’s auction record has been robust in recent years, and a collection of this scope and intimacy, assembled not by a speculator but by someone present for its making, offers something the primary market cannot replicate. Christie’s will hope buyers feel the difference.
Selections from the Anna Condo Collection will be offered at Christie’s New York on 21 May as part of the Post-War and Contemporary Art Day Sale.