Jorge Pardo

Jorge Pardo (b. 1963, Havana, Cuba)

Jorge Pardo 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 at Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2026); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2023); Miami Dade College, Museum of Art & Design, Miami (2021); Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld (2021); 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 lives and works in Merida, Mexico.

“I have an interest in making art that deeply reflects my life or ordinary things. And if you’re really going to look at something you’re going to unravel a bunch of different positions, different contradictions. It’s about how to make a machine that can present these things, that can give information and at the same time make it clear that this is really more a set of contingencies than an answer to something.”

—Jorge Pardo

Career Highlights

Project, DIA Art Center, 2000

1963 Born Havana, Cuba

1969 Moves to Chicago

1982-84 University of Illinois at Chicago, US

1984-88 BFA, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, US

1990 Pardo makes minor adjustments to existing objects at Thomas Solomon’s Garage

1994 Pardo designs the façade and the interior fittings of Neugerriemschneider, Berlin

Premiere exhibition with Petzel. Pardo presents 10 copies of a catalogue containing the blueprints of a Pardo designed home. A portion of the proceeds of this exhibition went on to fund Pardo’s Sea View Lane project with MOCA LA.

1997 Pier, Skulptur Projekte Münster, Münster, DE

1998 Pardo builds a house, titled Sea View Lane, as his exhibition for MOCA LA. The house was on view to the public through the course of the exhibition, then Pardo moved in with his family.

2000 Presents Project at the DIA Art Center

2001 For his fourth exhibition at Petzel Gallery, Pardo exhibited fifteen monochromatic, geometric forms housing “pinhole cameras”. Each sculpture will take a black and white photograph of another, and the resulting photographs are compiled into a book.

Penelope, Wholstenholme Square, Liverpool, 2004

2003 In Prototype at the DIA Art Center, Pardo creates habitable environments, in this case a cabin, that set up a reflexive situation.

In collaboration with gallerist Steve Hanson, Pardo opens The Mountain Bar in Los Angeles.

2004 Pardo designs a home for Cesar and Mimi Reyes, Old San Juan, PR. He goes on to design another home for them in Mérida.

Penelope, Sculpture at Wholstenholme Square, Liverpool, UK

Oliver, oliver, oliver, Braunschweig Parcours for Kulturinstitut. In his 2004 installation in Braunschweig, Germany, the artist conscripted a new medium—film— into his ongoing conceptual mission to blur the line between subject and object.

2007 Pardo’s exhibition House travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami and Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland

2008 Untitled (reinstallation of the Latin American Galleries), LACMA Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, US

2009 Installation at K21 Düsseldorf

2010 Situated deep in Mexico’s Yucatan Jungle, Pardo responds to the ruins of a 17th century hacienda Tecoh

For his 2010 show at Petzel, Pardo 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.

Staircase, L’Arlatan Hotel, Arles, France

2014 For Jorge Pardo et la Sculpture Romane, Musée des Augustins (The International Festival of Art), Toulouse, Pardo set the stage for displaying the museum’s collection of early Gothic and

2017 Self Portraits show at Petzel

57th Venice Biennial

2018 Pardo completes the ambitious Hotel L’Arlatan in Arles, France

2019 Jorge Pardo: Flamboyant, Pinacoteca de Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo

2021 Jorge Pardo: Mongrel, Miami Dade College, Museum of Art & Design, Miami, Florida

All bets are off, Petzel, New York

A chair, lamps, a museum. miteinander gegenüber #2, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld

2023 Jorge Pardo: JP @ SCAD, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia

2025 Petzel, New York

2026 Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, Mexico (forthcoming)

Complete CV