Jorge Pardo
1301PE is pleased to present our seventh solo exhibition with Jorge Pardo. Presenting a single painting in one room, Pardo’s canvas engulfs the viewer in swirling color, amorphous shape, and distorted texture.
Pardo has digitally combined and layered over 30 years of 1301PE exhibition posters, leaving only a semblance of their original characteristics, into a monumental conglomerate of organic forms. While the original posters become faceless, the large, printed-then-hand-painted canvas transforms into an exemplar of Pardo’s sensibility; his work shares a sense of color harmony, where painterly questions come into play in an oeuvre that otherwise tends to work in quite different art historical spheres, including sculpture, installation and architecture.
Oscillating between abstraction and representation, Pardo manipulates our understanding of the image and antagonizes our desire for clarification. Sections are deepened or softened with the stacking of acrylic paint, colors disperse or coalesce according to where our bodies stand in relation to the work, and our perspective is consistently challenged depending on our point of view. Pardo wants us stuck in the middle – of the painting, of the room, of knowing.
Jorge Pardo (b. 1963, Havana, Cuba) received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. In 2024, he was named the Landcraft Garden Foundation’s Sculpture in the Garden artist. His solo museum exhibitions include SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, (2023); Museum of Art & Design, Miami (2021); Pinacoteca de Estado São Paulo, São Paulo (2019); Hacienda la Rojeña, Tequila, MX (2019); Musée des Augustins, Toulouse (2014); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2010); K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2009); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2008); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2007). Paintings by the artist were included in the 57th Venice Biennale (2017). He has been the recipient of the MacArthur Fellowship Award (2010); the Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Artist Award (2001); and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1995). His work is part of many public collections including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Jorge Pardo currently lives and works in Mérida, Mexico.