Review: Jorge Pardo at 1301PE →

Jorge Pardo | ArtForum

by Jan Tumlir

“Art is what it has become,” Theodor Adorno unequivocally declares in Aesthetic Theory (1970). His statement implies that the original meaning of a work can be completely overturned by its contemporary circumstances. A similar point can be made about gallery practice: Operational protocols, once seemingly set in stone, can undergo ground-up rethinking with every slight shift in our systems of informational and economic distribution. Jorge Pardo’s latest outing at 1301PE addressed this process from an ironic distance. But some measure of warmth could also be felt here, directed from the artist to the gallery’s founder, Brian Butler, with whom he has worked closely since the earliest days of his career. 

This show consisted of just one painting, Untitled, 2024, the scale and proportions of which closely matched those of the wall on which it hung, one that faced the entrance to a reconfigured downstairs gallery. Normally, this space opens onto a corridor that connects to the reception desk and office, and, farther on, to a stairway leading up to a second showroom. On this occasion, however, the passage had been sealed. In a period when commercial galleries are increasingly prone to hedging their bets with “mixed nuts,” something-for-everyone assortments of art, this was a rather striking proposition. Even more so was the fact that this work could be read as a kind of tribute to its site. At a distance, the painting appeared resolutely abstract, nonreferential, this impression reinforced by its title (or lack thereof). Observed more closely, it was revealed to be suffused with information. Its surface teems with material gleaned from every poster Butler had produced to accompany the gallery’s exhibitions up to then. Snippets of typography and fragments of imagery are scattered throughout, as if drawn through a shredder and then spread, mulch-like, across the picture plane. As with much of the artist’s work, Pardo layered, condensed, and recomposited the source data with the aid of computer programs run with minimal interference. Nevertheless, the result bore a strikingly organic aspect. From its earthy, autumnal tones to the quasi-gestural application of each daub of color, the painting greeted the eye as a kind of Arcadian landscape akin to those by Édouard Vuillard.

Read more here.

Inside An Intimate Dinner In Support Of The LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund →

Jorge Pardo | Elle Decor

Photo by Katie Jones

By Sean Santiago

Last weekend, ELLE Decor hosted an intimate dinner at Ardor at The West Hollywood EDITION in support of the LA Arts Community Fire Relief Fund. The event was supported by Visit West Hollywood and Monacelli, off the back of Primack and Weissenberg’s Love How You Live: Adventures in Interior Design multi-city book tour. Each guest took home a copy of the book along with their own one-of-a-kind plate, hand-painted by artist Jorge Pardo. Sales of the plates, currently available by special order through the AGO Projects site, will raise money for the relief fund.

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At Guadalajara Art Weekend, Open Studios Are the Biggest Draw →

Jorge Mendez Blake, Jorge Pardo and Pae White | Observer

Ceramica Suro’s annual Comida celebration during ART WKND GDL. Photo by Tuna Unalan.

By Elisa Carollo

The highlight of the evening at Plataforma was a conversation between Cuban artist Jorge Pardo and American artist Pae White, both of whom have long-standing ties with José Noé Suro. Pardo’s immersive, labyrinthine installation of luminous ceramic walls and colorful lamps seamlessly intertwined with White’s newest series of sculptures, forming an engaging, multisensory environment that explored how visual curiosity and emotional impulses shape perception.

The final stop was the studio of conceptual artist Jorge Méndez Blake, whose multimedia practice explores the intersection of literature, art and architecture—disciplines humans use to define their existential and operational space, imposing structure and direction upon it. Deconstructed pages of famous books transform into constellations of meaning, as Méndez Blake distills single characters, isolating them in a careful, rational order. Across his sprawling studio, various workstations held a series of hyperrealistic paintings, which, through trompe-l’œil techniques, similarly yet more directly challenge the viewer’s perception of reality. These paintings also serve as tools for conceptualizing and developing his other projects, reinforcing the artist’s fascination with language, illusion and the ways in which knowledge is both constructed and dismantled.

Read more here.

Here are the 10 Must-See Gallery Shows in LA This Month →

Jorge Pardo | Cultured Mag

Jorge Pardo, Untitled, 2024. Image courtesy of the artist and 1301PE.

By Giuliana Brida

Jorge Pardo

Where: 1301PE
When: Through January 11, 2025
Why It’s Worth A Look: Layering 30 years of 1301PE’s exhibition posters into a kaleidoscopic collage of color and form, Jorge Pardo’s monumental canvas blurs the line between a painting and its environment. The result is a dizzying play of abstraction and representation, a work that refuses to be pinned down and demands you step closer to decode its mysteries.
Know Before You Go: Depending on where you stand, colors collide or dissolve, textures sharpen or soften, and the image shifts like a mirage. Pardo wants you lost in the middle of it all—caught between recognition and abstraction, where every angle reveals something new. 

Read more here.

Step Inside a Bewitching Ranch House in Malibu →

Jorge Pardo | Architectural Digest

Photography by Mark Seelen

By Mayer Rus

Despite the eye-rolling hauteur of the word Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, it is the mot juste to describe what Pardo has wrought: a dizzying, kaleidoscopic fantasy interior in which the floors, walls, ceilings, and furnishings filigree into a single orgasmic organism, brought to life through the artist’s signature experiments with form, pattern, and color. There’s a primary bedroom suite at one end of the structure, two guest rooms at the other, a kitchen/dining zone, and a sunken living room, the latter two mediated by a floor-to-ceiling storage volume clad in quotidian prefab wood shingles that strike a dramatic contrast note amid all the calligraphic finery. “It’s really a simple building, but when you step inside it’s optically extreme,” Pardo says, describing the symphony of engraved, punctured, and otherwise manipulated walls, windows, doors, and furnishings, all fabricated using CNC computer-driven machining processes.

Read more here.

JP@SCAD →

Jorge Pardo | Savannah College of Art and Design

Jorge Pardo, "Untitled," 2022, set of five lamps: glass and hardware, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Petzel, New York.

Alive with color and form, hand-blown glass pendant lamps are suspended from the museum ceiling and scattered in a glowing spectrum that spans more than 100 feet. Responding to the unique length of the gallery, Pardo also situates a new large-scale textile within the space. Collaging a singular image from previous paintings, the artist remixes his work into a monumental digital print presented on a massive table assembled from wood panels that have been intricately carved in abstract patterns based on mangrove roots. Through the careful placement of these elements in the gallery, Pardo questions inherent notions and emphasizes the relationship between art and life.

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After 25 Years, an Artist’s Home Reopens as an Art Gallery →

Jorge Pardo | Hyperallergic

View of River Styx at Sea View with works by Erica Mao, Coco Young, Heidi Lau (hanging), Joseph Elmer Yoakum, and Gretta Solie (bench and chair) (photography by Nice Day Photo, courtesy Sea View)

By Matt Stromberg

In 1993, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles offered Jorge Pardo an exhibition as part of its Focusseries. The young Cuban-born artist had begun making a name for himself with objects that blurred the lines between art and design, but this would be his first solo museum show in LA, where he had settled after receiving his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena in 1988. Instead of creating pieces to display inside a museum, he conceived of an artwork that would exist entirely outside of it. “I have a sloped lot and an idea for a house,” he told Hunter Drohojowska-Philp in the Los Angeles Times in 1998. “How can I take those ingredients and make them do something you wouldn’t expect?”

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Jorge Pardo at MOAD: An Exploration of The Immigrant Experience Through Art →

Jorge Pardon | City Lifstyle Miami

Article by Marcia Morgado

“In Mongrel, an exploration of the hyphenated idiosyncrasies of exiles, Pardo relives and shares memories from the time he left his native Cuba as a child and, along with thousands of his compatriots, was welcomed at the historic Freedom Tower, which now houses MOAD. Here we find a space of reflection accomplished by recreating an interior that conveys the sense of exile, loss, of fragmentation. Still, in the colors and textures, we also find light and the possibility of fulfillment.”

Jorge Pardo Continues to Redefine What It Means to Live With Art

Jorge Pardo | Surface | By Alexxa Gotthardt

The artist's exploration into the intersections among design, painting, sculpture, and everyday objects has resulted in a colorful and enchanting style that stands out for its originality.

In 1990, Jorge Pardo staged his first solo exhibition, in a garage tucked into a West Hollywood alley, filling it with carefully crafted replicas of common tools: wrenches, a ladder, a splicer. But none of them worked. Even then, fresh out of graduate school, Pardo was challenging perceptions of fine art and functional objects. This project, and his subsequent work, exuberantly broke barriers between sculpture and design, form and function, art and life.

Eight years later, MOCA Los Angeles invited Pardo to mount a show. Instead, he built a home, opened it to the public, and then moved in. Most recently, the Cuban-American artist designed a hotel, L’Arlatan in Arles, France, swathed with 500 of his own paintings applied directly to doors and tables rather than walls.

New York’s Petzel Gallery recently showcased Pardo’s early work, spanning the late-1980s and 1990s. His sculptures and wall-mounts emphasize a natural inclination to subvert expectations about art, design, and lived space. And much like the rest of his oeuvre, they celebrate plurality. Assumptions, he seems to say, are ambiguous and constantly changing.

Here, we catch Pardo at his studio in Yucatán, Mexico, where he sheds light on his multidisciplinary, inquisitive practice.

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Jorge Pardo: Display for the Musée des Augustins

Jorge Pardo: Display for the Musée des Augustins

Jorge Pardo

Published by Hatje Cantz

Ed. Thierry Leviez, text(s) by Thierry Leviez, Rémi Papillault, Rémi Parcollet, Charlotte Riou, contributions by Stephen Prina, Jorge Pardo

Exhibition: Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, on permanent display

Hardcover, 160 pages, 171 ills.

ISBN 978-3-7757-4462-1

Extraordinary museum displays: Jorge Pardo’s “Gesamtkunstwerk” in Toulouse

At the invitation of the Toulouse art festival “Printemps de Septembre”, the Cuban-American artist Jorge Pardo (*1963) has developed a new display for the collection of Romanesque art at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse. This collection—the world’s largest collection of Romanesque sculpture—is unique for its coherence with its well-preserved ensembles of capitals. Pardo produced a kind of “Gesamtkunstwerk” that has instantly become an iconic feature in the city and has now been adopted as the permanent display. This book includes an introduction to the collection of Romanesque sculptures at the museum, an illustrated history of its ever-changing presentation since 1830, an extensive survey of Jorge Pardo’s specific works for museums as well as a brief history of remarkable exhibition designs for museum collections throughout the 20th century.

With an interview between Stephen Prina and Jorge Pardo.

Jorge Pardo: Hotel L'Arlatan Opening 12 October 2018

From Antiquity to the present day, L’Arlatan has endured through many centuries. Its rebirth this autumn heralds yet another glorious new chapter in its history.

About L’Arlatan

As early as the Middle Ages L’Arlatan was recognised as being Arles’ most lavish hôtel particulier - a grand townhouse - and now, thanks to the exceptional vision of artist Jorge Pardo, it is making an outstanding début on the modern stage. A gigantic 6000 square metres of mosaic now adorns the hotel with an explosion of colour, light and contemporary design.

Hotel Website

how to spend it, Jorge Pardo: A long weekend in Arles and the Camargue with Maja Hoffmann

Maja Hoffmann at L’Arlatan hotel, which opens in October | Image: Tina Hillier

Arles’ old town is home to a world-class pâtisserie and a prominent bookshop

Culture is everywhere in Arles. I’ve almost always had something to do with Les Rencontres de la Photographie, the international photography festival that was founded there in 1970 and has been expanding greatly since it was revamped in 2002. What originally motivated me to renovate the former train depot at Parc des Ateliers – and build [experimental museum complex] Luma there – was partly a lack of quality spaces to show large-scale photography exhibitions or host creative events for Les Rencontres.

In the past few years I’ve really noticed some exciting energy in Arles. Creative people are coming to the city to settle down and make something special – like the owners of Le Collatéral, an incredible B&B in a former church that’s often used for artistic projects and events. Everywhere you look there is something curious, from digital art to a bespoke, snake-shaped table. It’s more of an experience than a hotel. Of course, L’Hôtel Particulier and Hôtel Jules César are very well known five-star properties in Arles. L’Hôtel Particulier was one of the first to add new life to the old city – they took over an 18th-century building and created a little oasis, with a swimming pool and beautiful garden – and the Jules is an institution that was redone beautifully a few years ago by Christian Lacroix. I myself never meant to be a hotelier, but ended up one due to the fact that I am occasionally asked to save old buildings. Ten years ago I opened Hôtel du Cloître, which I asked India Mahdavi to design and still today the interiors feel very modern. The most recent hotel project, L’Arlatan [which opens in October], is just as much of an artistic project as it is a hospitality one. Almost from the beginning, I knew I would ask Jorge Pardo to design the interiors; he did every surface and piece of furniture, and there are more than 30 different coloured and patterned tiles used for the floors and walls. It’s like a Gesamtkunstwerk.

By Gisela Williams

Full Article

Wallpaper*: Maja Hoffmann and Jorge Pardo on creating a remarkable Provençal retreat

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh, ravaged by heavy drinking and disillusioned with life in Paris, found refuge in Arles, intent on creating an artists’ commune. ‘L’Atelier du Sud’ would, he hoped, become a laboratory to experiment with colours and light, repositioning the Provençal city as a centre for artistic production. But the project ended abruptly the same year, after a series of violent quarrels with his friend Paul Gauguin – the only artist who had responded to the invitation – drove the Dutchman to a mental breakdown, during which he famously cut off part of his own ear.

Despite its failure, the ideals behind l’Atelier du Sud left an indelible mark on Arles which, some 130 years later, may get its artist colony after all. Designed by the Cuban-born American artist Jorge Pardo, l’Arlatan – a hotel and artist residence, housed in a 15th-century palace once belonging to the Counts of Arlatan de Beaumont – is set to become a hub for the international intelligentsia brought to the city by the newly established contemporary art centre, Luma Arles.

By BenoÎt Loiseau

Full Article

Blouin: Jorge Pardo's Creative Confusion

Jorge Pardo is the kind of artist whose practice is hard to neatly fold into a single sentence, unless it’s a run-on. He has reinvigorated, and fully furnished, a 19th-century hacienda in the northern Yucatan jungle, “Tecoh”; added Minimalist yet vivid decor into a liturgical parish in Leipzig; suffused undulating forms into the Latin American Galleries of LACMA; sprinkled bubblegum-bright tiles throughout the ground floor of New York’s Dia building; created towering public sculptures in Liverpool whose stalks were punctuated by illuminated Plexiglas spheres. His impactful early work was a single-story residential structure at 4166 Sea View Lane made for the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA, which he later moved into.

Born in Cuba and raised in the US, Pardo’s home base for the past 10 years has been Merida, Mexico. This locus has influenced Pardo precisely because “there’s not a lot of art here,” he said. The polychromatic work he produces can evolve without distractions in the immersive tropical context (barring his regular jaunts to New York City to see his daughter).

His relationship to pattern — the optics he fashions using a vibrant palette — is based on perpetual experimentation. Rearranging and rearranging paint chips in a way that imbues an inherent playfulness, “I’m always looking at color relationships,” he said.

On the phone from his studio, the affable Pardo refuses to intellectualize his work, recognizing instead the meandering curiosity that motivates his creativity. He studied at Art Center College of Design in California (Mike Kelley was one of his advisers) but, he countered, “I read so much theory when I was a kid, it was ridiculous,” adding: “we were forcefed.” Instead: “I tend to privilege what I was thinking, not necessarily what I was trying to achieve,” he said. “I don’t like the artist being an ‘authority.’” Although his aesthetics evoke something beautiful and whole, cohesion is not his priority. “I wanted to make an object that would resist a certain critical formalization,” he once told author Lane Relyea during an interview. “I wanted to make a work that would impose a lot of different critical modes.” He reiterated: “I’m not particularly interested in formal questions — I don’t know how to believe in that.” As an artist, “your only contract with the viewer is to literally just show them something,” he said.

Full Article

The New York Times, Jorge Pardo: A Hotel Where Every Room Is a Work of Art

One of Pardo’s painted doors, inspired by a Japanese scroll painting from the Langen Foundation. Credit Céline Clanet

The artist Jorge Pardo designed the interiors of L’Arlatan, which opens next month in Arles, France.

The artist Jorge Pardo makes work that not only lives outside the confines of the traditional white cube but also interrogates notions of space and setting and our place within them. One of his best-known pieces dates to 1998, when, for a show with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, he designed a single-story house in the city’s Cypress Park neighborhood and filled it with objects of his own making. Once the exhibition closed, Pardo moved in. “I’m essentially appropriating architecture,” says Pardo, who now lives in Mérida, Mexico, in another structure that could be considered both art piece and functional living space — a “birdcage in the jungle” complete with a hand-painted mural and ovoid pendant lights.

Starting next month at L’Arlatan hotel in the Provençal city of Arles, France, for which Pardo designed the interiors, guests can live like the artist. The hotel is owned by Maja Hoffmann, a Swiss entrepreneur and art patron who grew up outside Arles in the Camargue. She is partly responsible for reviving the area, once a source of inspiration for Vincent van Gogh (and recently, the setting for Gucci’s 2019 resort collection), with her forthcoming 20-acre cultural center, Luma Arles, as well as the 19-room Hôtel du Cloître, a former convent reimagined by India Mahdavi. Hoffmann’s new hotel, set in a 15th-century palace, is nearby, mere steps from the Rhône. From the start, Hoffmann knew she wanted Pardo — with whom she’s worked before — to be the one to fill the hotel’s dark and neglected rooms with, as she says, “lightness and joy.”

By Gisela Williams

Full Article

Jorge Pardo: Victoria Miro, London, UK

Jorge Pardo
2 February - 24 March 2018

Victoria Miro
16 Wharf Road
London N1 7RW

Comprising paintings and large-scale chandeliers, the exhibition will draw viewers into an environment of form, colour, illumination and shadow.

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Download Press Release

Jack Goldstein and Jorge Pardo: The Borgmann Donation, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

Jump into the future
Art from the 90’s and 2000’s. The Borgmann Donation
25 Nov 2017 till 4 Mar 2018

Stedelijk Museum
Museumplein 10
1071 DJ Amsterdam

The exhibition Jump into the Future –  Art from the 90's and 2000's. The Borgmann Donation shows an extensive number of contemporary art works from the German collector Thomas Borgmann.

Jump into the Future - Art from the 90's and 2000's. The Borgmann Donation is a major exhibition that occupies no less than 2.540 m2 - all thirty of the first-floor galleries that surround the museum’s grand staircase. The group of works that will join the collection of the Stedelijk is made up of a donation, a purchase and long-term loan. The gift is the second largest in the history of the Stedelijk. The majority of The Borgmann Donation is included in Jump into the Future.

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Jorge Pardo: Petzel Gallery, New York

Jorge Pardo
Self Portraits
27 October 2017 - 6 January 2018

Petzel
456 W 18th Street
New York, New York 10011

Candid snapshots of Jorge Pardo in workaday situations—man-spreading in a chair, strolling down the street, posing in Brazilian swim trunks—taken by friends, family, studio assistants, as well as up-close-and-personal Selfies, are the foundation for these 15 new paintings. And then the metamorphosis begins, simultaneously upending what defines a painting and a self portrait. Amalgamating craftsmanship and computerized manipulation with a range of media, Pardo creates an intricate, hybridized fusion of painting and sculpture. The images are bastardized—blown-up, engraved, laser-cut, hand-painted and back-lit with LEDs, to produce, in some cases, vast ornamental objects. Tiers of milled, perforated wood and Plexiglas overlap and interact on a relief which dissipates and parodies both self and portrait. Transparency, light, and color add further layers of complexity to these works—when illuminated the shapes, patterns and subjects within the paintings alter. A larger transformation occurs when the works are hung from the ceiling; the paintings morph into seemingly weightless light-boxes.

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