Born in Concord, New Hampshire, in 1957, George Condo studied music theory and art history at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. He put both academic pursuits into practice: upon leaving college for Boston he joined a band and worked at a silk-screen shop. Condo’s breakthrough into the art world came in the 1980s, after he moved to New York City’s East Village. His paintings of what he called “artificial realism”—in which abstract phenomena were rendered in a realist style—placed him in the spotlight with fellow newcomers Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. They died young. But Condo is still painting; in recent years he’s been the subject of shows at the Berggruen Museum and the Phillips Collection. Now, a two-part exhibition of Condo’s pastel works comes to Hauser & Wirth and Sprüth Magers, in New York. —Jack Sullivan