Jorge Pardo

Description

Jorge Pardo is the key art/architecture cross-over artist of the current generation. Architectural elements such as walls, seating, lighting and circulation solutions are combined with ‘art’ elements such as murals, coloured glass and sculpture to create highly livable, elegant spaces. He combines modernist aesthetics and ‘form-follows-function’ dogma with his highly sensitive attention to colour, materials and texture to create his signature streamlined sculptures and built environments.

Havana-born, California-based Pardo is often called upon to ‘heal’ the uncomfortable spaces created by neglect all around us. Pardo looks at the unlivable spaces produced primarily by automobile-culture and consumer-culture, and creates unity and harmony through subtle architectural solutions. For example, he was invited to offer an aesthetic and utilitarian renovation of lobby, bookstore, and first-floor gallery at New York’s Dia Centre. There, Pardo created an ebullient design for the 9,000-square-foot lobby and first-floor space, reconsidering the audience’s experience by smoothing circulation and enhancing visitor amenities. He infused the ground floor with natural and refracted light by means of a ceramic tiles in an exhilarating combination of sky blues, mustard yellows and lime greens.

Pardo’s architectural work includes a pier for Sculpture Project Munster in 1997 (now permanent) as well as other commissions, including a cafe for the Leipzig Messe in Germany in 1996, and the renovation of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.

Recipient of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Award, Pardo’s work has been internationally acclaimed in over 100 exhibitions and is featured in many museums’ collections, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Tate (London), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), and the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum (Rotterdam).

In the interview Lane Relyea discusses Pardo’s life and motivations, his move from Cuba to Chicago when he was a child, his desire to emancipate himself from the suburban emigre’ community, his school days at the Los Angeles Art Center, and his break in the art world.

Christina Vegh’s survey examines the evolution of Pardo’s work from the early, minimal sculptural pieces through more space-concerned, less object-related installation, ultimately culminating in large-scale architectural work.

Chris Kraus focuses on 4166 Seaview Lane, a house Pardo presented in 1998 in the context of a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and where he now resides.

Lane Relyea is Assistant Professor of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He writes regularly for such magazines as Artforum, Art in America and Parkett, and he has contributed to numerous publications, including monographs on such artists as Vija Celmins (2004) and Wolfgang Tillmans (2006), and exhibition catalogues such as ‘Helter Skelter’ (1992) and ‘Public Offerings’ (2001).

Christina Végh has been Director of the Bonner Kunstverein since 2005, where she has organized exhibitions on such artists as Jonas Dahlberg and Jàn Mancuska (2005) and John Baldessari (2007). In 2000 she curated an exhibition on Jorge Pardo at Kunsthalle Basel, and she has written extensively on his work. She contributes to a range of art journals, including Parkett and Kunstbulletin, and her published writing includes texts on Franz Ackermann, Yehudit Sasportas and Corey McCorkle.

Chris Kraus, a writer based in Los Angeles, is founding editor of Semiotext(e)’s Native Agents imprint. She has written on art, poetics and theory for numerous academic anthologies and art magazines, and she is the author of Video Green, a collection of essays about the Los Angeles art world.

Additional information

Dimensions	1 × 10 × 11.5 in
Series	Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series
Imprint	Phaidon Press
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780714846583
ISBN-10	0714846589
Author	Chris Kraus, Christina Végh, Lane Relyea
Audience	General / adult