Conversations brings together a broad range of dialogues between author Jan Tumlir and artist Jorge Pardo, which span a period of 20 years, beginning in 1999. They encompass contemporary art, design, publishing, and music, and connect the varied contexts of Los Angeles and Mérida, Mexico, where they took place. The result is a story of a unique intellectual friendship that has defined both of their thinking and practice. Describing his work as “shaping space” Jorge Pardo has made work that moves freely across the notional disciplines of art, architecture, and design throughout his over thirty-year career. His constructions range from a single light sculpture, to paintings, rooms or an assembly of buildings that combine all the individual elements of his artistic creation in the mode of the Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art.” His work contends with distinctions of private and public space, while calling to mind references as diverse as the Light and Space movement, Land art, modernist design and the color, flora and fauna of his home in Mérida, Mexico. Jan Tumlir is an art writer and teacher, who lives and works in Los Angeles. He is a contributing editor for the art journal X-TRA, and his writing has appeared in Artforum, Aperture, Flash Art, Art Review, and Frieze. Tumlir is a member of the humanities and sciences faculty at Art Center College of Design.
Contributors: Jorge Pardo, Jan Tumlir
Publisher: Inventory Press and neugerriemschneider
Language: English
Softcover: 272 pages
5.25 x 8 in
ISBN: 978-1-941753-38-5
About the artist
Jorge Pardo (b. 1963, Havana, Cuba)
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 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.
His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including Pinacoteca de Estado São Paulo, São Paulo (2019); Hacienda la Rojeña, Tequila, MX (2019); Victoria Miro, London (2018); Petzel, New York (2017); José García, Mérida, MX (2016); David Gill Gallery, London (2015); Musée des Augustins, Toulouse (2014); neugerriemschneider, Berlin (2014); Gagosian Gallery, New York (2010); 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).
His work is part of numerous 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 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).
Jorge Pardo currently lives and works in Merida, Mexico.
