JORGE PARDO: UNTITLED
PETZEL is pleased to present Jorge Pardo's exhibition of new paintings and lamps.
October 30 – December 20, 2025
With vibrant paintings, hanging sets of pendants and new floor lamps, Pardo builds upon his interest in fusing machine and hand-made media to create works that are paradoxically bound to conditions of time, memory, and space.
Referring to his paintings as “artworks to think with,” Pardo uses a procedural approach he has developed over the past half decade. He overlaps far-spanning art historical sources digitally, which converge and intersect as vertices of light, color, and form to arrive at final images through a process of estrangement and dissociation. This allows him to forge unexpected affinities between seemingly disparate works, starting with the entirety of Monet’s Haystacks and intersecting them with the interventions of conceptually-informed artists like Michael Asher. Pardo feeds such influences—compositions by Monet, Asher, Joan Mitchell, Wayne Thiebaud, and others—through a mechanized order of operations, appropriating these images while disassembling them altogether. With the digital drawing complete, vectorized outlines are laser-etched on to canvas and hand-painted with an effervescent palette of marigold yellows, pearlescent blues, and mossy greens.
Similarly, Pardo’s hanging pendants and floor lamps draw upon both Monet’s Haystacks and Warhol’s Shadows. Armed with architectural software, the artist machines these mythical lighting effects so tangled in art historical discourse. The resulting lightworks slice, abstract and restructure the interior light of Monet and the exterior saturation of Warhol’s shadows onto laser-cut planes of painted acrylic sheeting. For the floor lamps, Pardo has used over 50 Shadow paintings as his palette, assigning colors to each lamp. Unique, organic shapes emerge from the floor through acrylic that the artist warps with heat.
In addition to the exhibition, Pardo has invited an ensemble of artists, curators, writers, psychoanalysts, scientists, and thinkers to give brief lectures instead of each painting’s titles as ephemeral stand-ins. The lectures will take place on December 13, 2025, with more details forthcoming.
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); and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1995).