Jorge Pardo – The Café at Neue Nationalgalerie Jorge Pardo engages with sculpture, painting, installation and architecture, among a variety of other disciplines, to create work that enters into dialog with and transforms its own spatial context. Employing in equal measure tangible media such as wood, metal and acrylic glass, and immaterial factors like light and shadow, the effects of Pardo's work stretch far beyond the bounds of the objects themselves. Beginning in the late 1980s, Pardo created work that brought into question the expectations and nature of everyday items, and by the mid 1990s, expanded this practice to include the complete reimagining or ground-up design of structures - an approach that he continues to develop to this day. With his Gesamtkunstwerke, or total works of art, he incidentally or directly suggests frameworks for and approaches to experiences of spaces both public and private. Jorge Pardo has created seminal pieces for Skulptur Projekte Münster, Paul-Löbe-Haus at the German Bundestag, K21 - Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dia Art Foundation and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others, and has created large-scale architectural projects such as the exhibition-turned- home 4166 Sea View Lane (1998) and the reimagined centuries-old hacienda Tecoh (2006- 2012). Works by Pardo are in the collections of institutions such as Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate, Stedelijk Museum and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Untitled (2021), Jorge Pardo’s room-sized, site-specific installation for Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie’s café, comprises a suite of hanging light sculptures and a floor-to-ceiling array of warmly toned wall tiles. 48 multi-layered, tiered aluminum fixtures, hand-bent and powder-coated in dynamic shades of grey, are finely water jet-cut with an ornate pattern inspired by Pardo’s Cuban roots and the flora, fauna, Mayan culture and crafts tradition of Mexico’s Yucatán, where he lives and works. The works are suspended from the café’s ceiling and illuminated from within, with the light passing through their intricate cutouts casting a mesmerizing play of shadow throughout the space. The wall tiles, created from MDF and painted in oranges, yellows and browns, are laser-cut with a motif complementing that of the light sculptures. Lending the installation exceptional depth through its multi-layer composition, the all-encompassing arrangement of over 3,000 square-shaped tiles invites visitors to reconsider their own surroundings. Pardo sees the Neue Nationalgalerie’s glass-and-steel building, designed by Ludwig Mies van 1 der Rohe, as one that “puts life on display” by means of its transparent panes and outward- facing, “extroverted” nature. Expanding upon this notion, the artist’s Untitled creates a similar showcase within the architect’s vitrine-like structure. Here, Pardo’s environment playfully envelops its visitors and serves at once as both a standalone work and a backdrop for the activities conducted within it. He draws upon the legacy of Lilly Reich, the pioneering modernist designer, architect and Mies’ close collaborator, to reconsider the stark building’s interior. Through his use of pattern, geometry, color systems and spatial relations, Pardo shapes a dynamic, active constellation of elements that differentiates itself from its surroundings through its use of ornament and its ostentatious qualities. 2 .