Jorge Pardo (b. 1963)
Untitled
IOW glass lamp, in three parts
green lamp: 17⅜ x 13¾ x 12⅝in. (44 x 35 x 32cm.)
red lamp: 17⅛ x 15¾ x 11⅝in. (43.5 x 40 x 29.5cm.)
blue lamp: 15¾ x 15⅛ x 11in. (40 x 38.5 x 28cm.)
Executed in 2005, this work is unique

PROVENANCE

Haunch of Venison, London.

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SPECIALIST NOTES

Jorge Pardo’s lamps, wine racks, bedrooms, interior designs and architectural projects are made to be used, to be lived with, to be enjoyed. By retrieving the functional qualities of art objects, Pardo aims to collapse the boundaries between architecture, design and art. His multi-disciplinary approach allows him to activate spectatorship of the everyday, turning public and domestic space into aesthetic environments. His lamps articulate this sensibility perfectly. The juxtaposition of MDF and Murano glass demonstrate both the artist’s ability to subvert distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ categorizations and the designer’s sensitivity to the novel combination of materials. Similarly, his creation of a unique work as a functional item that is normally mass-produced encourages us to re-consider our pre-conceptions of what art should, or could, look like. Hanging between form and formlessness, in Pardo’s lamps the undulations of the glass and the rhythmic patterns traced by the decorative wood circumscription echo the colourful distribution of light that they will affect. This painterly attention to the sensual potential of objects is consistent with his admiration for modernist designers such as Alvar Aalto and Lily Reich. It is in the tradition of these radical re-interpreters of domestic environments that Pardo extends a rich history of approaching aesthetics concerns from the perspective of how they are lived.

Pardo was born in Havana in 1963 and studied at the University of Illinois and the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has exhibited widely at a number of major international museums and his work can be found in several prestigious collections the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Tate Britain, London. Pardo has also completed numerous site specific and architectural projects for major institutions and private commissions. His work can currently be seen in Summer Show, Petzel Gallery, New York, Come As You Are: Art of the 1990s, Telfair Museum, Savanna, KölnSkulptur #6, Skulpturenpark Cologne and Man in the Mirror at the Vanhaerents Collection, Brussels. Jorge Pardo lives and works in Mérida, Mexico and New York.

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