Artist Bio
Jorge Pardo was born in Havana, Cuba in 1963 and studied at the University of Illinois, Chicago and received his BFA from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. Pardo’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including Gió Marconi, Milan (2022); MOAD Miami (2021); Petzel Gallery, New York (2021); neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2021); Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne (2020); Hacienda la Roje?a, Tequila, MX (2019); Pinacoteca de Estado de S?o Paulo, S?o Paulo (2019); Petzel Gallery, New York (2019); José García, Mérida, MX (2018); neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2018);Victoria Miro, London (2018); Petzel Gallery, New York (2017); José García, Mérida, MX (2016); David Gill Gallery, London (2015) neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2014); Petzel Gallery, New York (2014); Gagosian Gallery, New York (2010); Gallery Gisela Capitain, Cologne (2012); 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, North Miami (2007). New paintings by the artist were included in the 57th Biennale di Venezia (2017). His work is part of numerous public collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London. Jorge Pardo has been the recipient of many awards including the MacArthur Fellowship Award (2010); the Smithsonian American Art Museum Lucelia Artist Award (2001); the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1995). Pardo currently lives and works in Mérida, Mexico.
Artist’s Work
Jorge Pardo’s artwork explores the intersection of contemporary painting, design, sculpture, and architecture. Employing a broad palette of vibrant colors, eclectic patterns, and natural and industrial materials, Pardo’s works range from murals to home furnishings to collages to larger than life fabrications. He often transforms familiar objects into artworks with multiple meanings and purposes, such as a set of lamps displayed as both sources of illumination and as freestanding sculptures, or a sailboat exhibited as both a utilitarian, seaworthy vessel and as a striking obelisk. Working on small and monumental scales, Pardo also treats entire public spaces as vast canvases. Pardo engages viewers with works that produce great visual delight while questioning distinctions between fine art and design. Of his persistent interest in creating objects that resist formal categorizations and that operate inside and outside the art world: “I’ve always thought that making an object that can enter the public sphere would be much more productive than framing it within a gallery. […] Things really opened up once I started to think about it that way. I no longer had to think about the exhibition space as the threshold and the frame but rather as part of a larger circuitry of things.”






Adjunct Professor, Visual Arts