| Jorge Pardo |
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Jorge
Pardo,
installation at Dia Art Center, New York, 2000
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Jorge
Pardo,
4146 Sea View Lane, MoCA, Los Angeles, 1998
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Jorge
Pardo,
Reading Room at Museum van Beuningen, Rotterdam,
1996 |
Jorge
Pardo was born in Havana (Cuba) in 1963. Lives in
Los Angeles.
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Jorge
Pardo will bring his expanded notion of art
practice to Dia Center for the Arts with a
project that completely transforms the ground
floor of Dia's 548 West 22nd Street facility. A
Los-Angeles-based artist, Pardo will richly and
subtly fuse the aesthetic and utilitarian in his
renovation of the Museum's lobby, bookstore, and
first-floor gallery.
Pardo's fresh, ebullient design for the
9,000-square-foot space reconsiders the
audience's experience by smoothing circulation,
enhancing visitor amenities, and infusing the
ground floor with natural and refracted light by
means of a lively palette of ceramic tiles in an
exhilarating combination of bright limes and
lemons offset by mustard yellows and avocado
greens.
The new experience will begin on West 22nd Street
as newly-opened windows and doors expose the
fluid space and inviting colors to passersby. The
reconfigured lobby will feature a relocated main
entrance, reception area, and ticketing facility
which opens into Dia's dramatically expanded
bookstore area. Here, the artist will introduce
stylish seating and extensive shelving to house
an in-depth selection of artist monographs and
catalogues, contemporary poetry, and volumes on
art history, theory and criticism, as well as
works from Electronic Arts Intermix's unrivalled
collection of artist videos. This enhanced
collection will serve as a much-needed resource
in New York City as well as an oasis for
comfortable browsing by gallery visitors. The
store will also provide space for such intimate
public programs as book signings, web launches,
and readings.
To reinforce the visual connections between
lobby, bookstore, and exhibition area, Pardo will
introduce mural paintings at these key junctures.
The animating presence of these abstractions,
along with the addition of large glass dividers,
will call viewers' attention to the differing
qualities and functions of each of
"Project's" component spaces while at
the same time facilitating smooth visual
transitions among them. In the first-floor
gallery, Pardo will present an object chosen
specifically for its iconic and associational
values with regard to the key conceptions
underpinning "Project."
Jorge Pardo was born in 1963 in Havana, Cuba, and
moved to the United States as a young child. He
earned his BFA at Art Center College of Design in
Pasadena and currently resides in Los Angeles.
Throughout his career, Pardo has mixed work
devised for traditional museum spaces with
artistic pursuits sited in other venues. He has
also combined interpretive and creative modes of
artistic practice by assuming the role of
"curator" on occasion. In 1997, Pardo
mounted a rotating exhibition of works selected
from the permanent collection of the Museum of
Contemporary Art, Chicago. This followed a
substantial commission to create a cafe for the
Leipzig Messe in Germany in 1996. Last year at
the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia,
Pardo renovated the reception spaces. The Berlin
Parliament has recently commissioned a large
project from Pardo to be realized in 2001.
Pardo's large-scale architectural work ranges
from what was planned as a temporary pier for
Sculpture Project Munster in 1997 but has now
become permanent, to a house, 4166 Sea View Lane,
which he presented in 1998 in the context of a
solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Los Angeles.
Dia
Center for the Arts press release 8/14/00
Jorge Pardo: Project
September 13, 2000 - June 17, 2001
Jorge
Pardo,
Untitled, 1999, Ceramic, Courtesy of 1301PE, Los
Angeles.
Photo
by Marcos García
Think of him as Jorge "Puff Daddy"
Pardo: a mixmaster, style sampler, recombiner of
expensive tracks, set to the beat of modernism.
Pardo's work has the look and feel of money well
spent; it's radical without being revolutionary,
confident enough to be taken only as design, yet
gets by on street cred. A darling of the curators
and critics, with more than 100 group shows and
articles on his résumé, Pardo/Puffy's a
supersuccessful artist-producer who jobs out
projects and gets things done. Like Sean Combs,
Pardo's got the name, and everyone wants to work
with him.
Jerry Saltz, The Village Voice,
Sept. 2000
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