Late Night in St. Moritz is an immaculate example of George Condo’s highly iconic and stylized paintings about modern society and the contemporary psyche. Best known for his figures which are instantly recognizable through their distortions and geometric additions, Condo has invented a new visual vocabulary that draws on the techniques and styles of his Modernist predecessors while imbued with contemporary abstraction. In the present composition, the multitude of figures, abstract forms, spatial and dimensional incongruity result in a fictional realm that is much like the raucous, disorienting atmosphere one would experience in the late hours during a night out.

Since the early 1980s, Condo has pioneered a hybrid-topography of the human figure, coining the term Artificial Realism to describe his hybridization of traditional European Old Master painting with popular culture. By appropriating and internalizing a multiplicity of pictorial languages to construct a new, contemporary vision of painting, the artist has thus created a unique brand of psychologically charged portraiture.