
1301PE is pleased to announce an exhibition of significant works from the collection of Pae White by Jorge Pardo. This will be the first exhibition exclusively devoted to this outstanding body of work by Pardo. A contemporary of Pardo’s, White was an early supporter when they were both students at Art Center Collage of Design in the late 1980s. Over the past 20 years, White has assembled a private collection of seminal works acquired at the time of their making.
The exhibition spans Pardo’s career, from his pinhole camera works to his resent Penelope lamp subscription. The collection contains key elements of Pardo’s visual language and traces Pardo’s evolution into one of his generations’ most important artists.
Over the course of his career, Pardo has employed a wide variety of mediums to explore his interests. As he pursues a particular course of exploration and inquiry derived from current interests, locations, conversations, etc., Pardo work creates frames for our experience. This can take place at a personal level, as in the series of photographs in 2008 which he refers to his childhood and family. Or it can take place at the level of cultural critique, as in White People Are Devils, 1991.
His recent works follow this familiar concept, but with a new twist. Pardo said about his temporary installation of the Pre-Columbian collection at LACMA that “The intention is to create a complete visual and historical experience and encourage further examination of what may previously have gone unnoticed. By housing the collection in a contemporary context it is hoped that the works become more accessible to today’s museum visitor.”
Jorge Pardo (b. 1963, Havana, Cuba) Pardo holds a BFA from the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has exhibited widely in various international institutions since his first solo show in Pasadena in 1988. In addition to participating in numerous international group exhibitions, Pardo has realized various permanent projects, including Reading Room at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (1996), Pier in the Skulptur Projekte in Munster (1997), and in 4166 Sea View Lane with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (1998), and Untitled (Cafe-Restaurant), K21, Dusseldorf (2002). He has had solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (1997), the Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam (1997), The Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia (1999), The Dia Foundation in New York (2000 and 2003), The Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in Deurle (2002), and Fundacio La Caixa in Barcelona (2004). Jorge Pardo: House, Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, USA (2007), Reinstallation of Latin American Galleries, LACMA, Los Angeles (2008), Jorge Pardo, K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany (2009), Jorge Pardo, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2010).
Jorge Pardo (b. 1963, Cuba) explores the intersection of contemporary painting, design, sculpture, and architecture. All of Pardo’s work shares a sense of colour harmony; in other words, painterly questions come into play in an oeuvre that otherwise tends to work in quite different art historical spheres, including sculpture, installation, and architecture. 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. As Christina Vegh observed, “Lamps, because of their function, are entirely suited to the forging of connections that is such a leitmotif within his oeuvre. (...) The key to Pardo’s objects is atmospheric lightness, sweeping arabesques and ornaments, along with the domestic and private aspects - elements that the French painter (Matisse) addressed throughout his lifetime. If one artist was interested in using colour effects to make light an effect or a subject for painting, the other (Pardo) takes the liberty of distributing actual light sources around the gallery and thus putting painterly questions on the agenda. (...) But Pardo is not concerned with pure light and pure colour in space, like Dan Flavin or James Turrell. And nor is he interested in wall-to-wall illumination. He is concerned with the various different lamp forms as elements that can create a composition within a particular spatial order and yet still recall everyday personal use, revealing their social dimension.”

Founded by Brian Butler in 1992, 1301PE is a contemporary art gallery exhibiting significant Los Angeles based artists as well as internationally established and acclaimed artists. The gallery is known for its exhibition of significant work across mediums. Founded on the principle of promoting Los Angeles artists worldwide, the gallery has been located at its current location in Miracle Mile, Los Angeles since 1998.

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