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until 19.08. | #3875ARTatBerlin | neugerriemschneider (Christinenstraße) presents from 29. April 2023 (Opening 28.04) the exhibition of the artist Jorge Pardo.
Neugerriemschneider presents Jorge Pardo’s 11th solo exhibition with the gallery, which sees the artist take as his point of departure iron window-covering bars found around Mérida, Mexico, where he lives and works. These constructions, in forms both abstract and physical, manifest here as monumental assemblages, intricate, vibrant paintings and brass-encased glass light sculptures. Building upon and departing from the window view as an art-historical trope, Pardo’s works are crucial developments within his practice-spanning exploration of the criteria by which a space is defined, and how it may be bridged to coexist with others.
Originally intended as purely protective architectural elements, window grilles gradually morphed to suit and complement their contexts, taking on the sensibilities, and eventually becoming integral parts of local vernaculars. With dynamic ambiguity, their significance shifting in accordance with physical perspective, they stand as intermediaries between public and private, outdoor and indoor, and are exemplary of built environments’ capacity to adapt to life around them. This notion – practical concerns becoming aesthetic, conceptual and social ones – is closely tied to Pardo’s artistic approach, a key anchoring point of which is the mutual exchange between disciplines, and the formation and perception of space.
Two towering assemblages—angular, painted, porous monoliths—are assembled from reclaimed metal window bars, stacked end-to-end in irregular arrays, and linking in rings. For these, the innately sculptural ironwork is transposed from its origins, but not stripped of its utilitarian roots. Instead, its purpose is adapted, now cordoning an area off from itself in reconfigurations of access and navigation.
A suite of large-scale paintings on laser-etched MDF fuses a wealth of visual material, ranging from photographs of found window bars, to everyday cell-phone screenshots and artwork reproductions. Digital manipulations of these sources are overlaid in layered compositions, their subjects transformed into near-painterly motifs, allowing the once-representative to become parts of a cohesive whole. Here, Pardo takes barriers designed to tangibly divide worlds, and deploys them as structural framing devices for a multifaceted, additive imagemaking process.
Illuminated, hand-blown glass light works suffuse the gallery, suspended in clusters, their shapes shifting through stages of abstraction. The cage-like brass encasements expand the window-grille through line that pervades the exhibition, adhering to the contours of the glass forms themselves. Seemingly containing the translucent glass without ever making contact, the robust exoskeletons materially contrast that which they surround. Select groupings descend into the sculptures, their light shining through sets of metallic bars in a modified simulation of the division and union of the domestic and the communal.
Location : Christinenstraße
Opening: Friday, 28. April 2023 – 6pm until 9pm
Exhibition dates : Saturday, 29. April until Saturday, 19. August 2023
To the Gallery
Image caption: Jorge Pardo, Untitled, 2023, Copyright Jorge Pardo, Courtesy the artist and neugerriemschneider, Berlin, Photo: Jens Ziehe, Berlin
Exhibition Jorge Pardo – Galerie neugerriemschneider | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Ausstellungen Berlin Galerien | ART at Berlin
