Skip to content

Press Release

Friedrich Petzel Gallery is pleased to announce the eighth solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Jorge Pardo.

Jorge Pardo's newest installation transforms the gallery space into a labyrinth of interlocking structures. Like a three-dimensional library, the images, which are amassed from the internet, depict unlimited categorical scenes of nature and culture. Pardo views art largely through the perspective of design and architecture, making no hierarchical distinctions between his paintings, sculptures, installations, buildings or lamps. This work continues Pardo's interest in appropriating domestic architectural elements that are alluring, practical, and continuously question the viewer's definition and expectation of what one may consider traditional fine art.

Jorge Pardo is among the first generation of artists to utilize fully the advancement in computer technologies to explore virtual spaces, utopias and the boundaries of museum spaces. Using the language of architecture and design to engage with fine art, Pardo's practice intertwines various disciplines to renovate everyday objects, homes and museum spaces into something new that draws the viewer into an active spectatorship. His influences include artist Robert Smithson, exhibition designer Llilly Reich, architects Bruce Goff and Tando Ando, and influential 20th-Century Finnish designer Alvar Aalto. Pardo addresses issues of space and environment, the valuations of objects and artworks, questioning where art ends and real life begins.

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1963, Jorge Pardo currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include mid-career surveys at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland; K21, Dusseldorf; Jorge Pardo: House, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, 2007-2008, and Fundacio La Caixa, Barcelona, 2004. Architectural projects and non-specific spaces have included the renovating a colonial home in Merida, Mexico; the re-design of the installation for the Pre-Columian collection at Los Angeles Museum of Art, Los Angeles, creating a restaurant, Untitled (Café-restaurant, 2002, for the K21 Museum in Dusseldorf, and 4166 Sea View Lane, 1998, a house built as an artwork and his home for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

The exhibition will open on Saturday May 8, with a reception from 6-8 p.m. and will remain on view through June 19. Friedrich Petzel Gallery is located at 535 West 22nd Street, New York, NY 10011. For further information, please contact the gallery at info@petzel.com, or call (212) 680-9467.

Please join us Sunday, May 9 at 2:30 pm as part of New York Gallery Week for a panel discussion with art historian Irving Sandler, architectural theorist and historian Nana Last and artist Jorge Pardo.