Jorge Pardo (b. 1963)

Executed in 2000, Jorge Pardo’s installation of six glass lamps probes the boundaries between architecture, design and art. Transforming public and domestic interiors into unique aesthetic environments, Pardo’s installations are fundamentally made to be inhabited, lived with and enjoyed. Challenging the traditional boundaries between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, Pardo transforms quotidian objects and rooms into otherworldly spaces, marked by ethereal arrangements of light and shape. His multi-disciplinary practice, which has included boats, furniture, wall and floor decorations and textiles, has invited comparison with twentieth-century modernists who also explored the intersection of art and design: from the Bauhaus and Russian constructivist movements, to American minimalists such as Donald Judd. At the same time, however, Pardo’s works are underpinned by an almost painterly logic, and his approach to line, colour and form has been compared to that of Henri Matisse. Born in Havana in 1963, Pardo has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf and the Irish Museum of Art, Dublin, among others. A further light installation from 2003 is held in the permanent collection of Tate, London.