Contemporary sculptures by Jorge Pardo

Jorge Pardo‘s sculptures, installations, paintings, buildings, and furnishings merge art with architecture and design. His Contemporary sculptures are remarkable.

Jorge Pardo is a Cuban-American artist born in 1963, Havana, Cuba, and it’s now based in Los Angeles, California.

Using vibrant colors and patterns and natural and industrial materials, he creates everyday objects and spaces with transformed meanings, such as lamps that function as both lighting and sculpture. He is well known for turning a home into a museum (4166 Sea View Lane for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, 1998, now Pardo’s own home) and for his 2008 redesign of Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)’s pre-Columbian galleries.

Bending, stretching, and breaking the boundaries between sculpture, installation, design, and décor, Jorge Pardo delights in upsetting art’s traditional dichotomy of high/low and banishing the cold, white cube image of contemporary art galleries. Instead, his Duchmpian shows often consume the gallery or museum space, filling it with carefully selected, colorful domestic accoutrements, prints or photographs by the artist, his signature squiggly lamps, and other prefabricated or artist-made objects.

Pardo says: “When I work with patterns and colour my interest is density of irregularity. It’s a simple system, which is really not much of a system: I choose a shape to disperse colour and any combinations of colour work.”

By turns a painter, designer, architect and display specialist, Jorge Pardo made just about everything he lives with – the furniture, the lamps, his studio, his house. His intensely colourful work seems to flow continuously from one founding impulsion. For going on twenty years he has tirelessly rethought and questioned aesthetic categories and hierarchies, drawing on the ambiguity of a system in which art is constantly undermined and the functional nearly always de-habilitated.