In Fashion Model (2025), George Condo continues to push the boundaries of portraiture by fusing the worlds of high fashion, satire, and psychological abstraction. The work presents a singular figure, elongated and doll-like, with an exaggeratedly simplified yet intensely expressive form. Condo’s Fashion Model is at once a parody of beauty standards and a celebration of the surreal possibilities of the human figure, showcasing his mastery at blending grotesque humor with elegance.

The figure, with its impossibly tall and narrow proportions, recalls the elongated silhouettes of runway models, yet Condo subverts the glamour by imbuing the subject with an absurdist twist: a cartoonish head with bulging eyes and a wide grin, paired with a body segmented into bold geometric planes of color. The vibrant palette—brilliant blues, reds, greens, and oranges—evokes the palette of modernist abstraction, while the pastel background softens the scene, heightening the tension between sophistication and parody.

Condo’s ability to play with form and identity is central to this work. Fashion Model engages with the art historical lineage of Picasso, Léger, and even Surrealism, yet reinterprets those traditions through the lens of contemporary culture. The model’s ponytail, rendered with almost comic exaggeration, underscores the performative, constructed nature of fashion and image-making. At the same time, the fractured geometry of the body suggests the internal pressures of self-presentation—the dissonance between how one is perceived and how one feels.

The humor in Fashion Model is sharp but never cruel. Instead, it reflects Condo’s fascination with the absurdities of modern life, where ideals of beauty, identity, and consumption collide. By distorting the model into an almost totemic figure, he critiques the rigidity of fashion-world aesthetics while celebrating the sheer theatricality of style. The work exists in the space between satire and reverence, between the grotesque and the glamorous.

In many ways, Fashion Model epitomizes Condo’s project of “psychological cubism”: the layering of external image with internal complexity. Behind the brightly colored façade lies a subtle commentary on the ways we construct and fragment identity in a culture obsessed with appearance. The result is a portrait that is humorous, vibrant, and deeply unsettling, holding a mirror to the contradictions of contemporary beauty and fashion.