Estate of Mercedes Pardo
Sicardi | Ayers | Bacino is pleased to announce the upcoming exhibition Mercedes Pardo: Color y Magia, our second solo exhibition featuring the work of master Mercedes Pardo [1921-2005, Venezuela], in our main gallery. This exhibition is presented in partnership with the Otero Pardo Foundation.
Join us for an opening reception on Thursday, May 18 from 6-8pm.
Color y Magia features a selection of Mercedes Pardo's serigraph prints dating from 1969-1998 that demonstrate the artist's extraordinary proficiency as a colorist and intuition in pairing subtle chromatic harmonies with compelling compositions. As noted by Rafael Santana, "Mercedes Pardo’s introduction to the subject of color had nothing to do with the theoretical approach wherewith the founding masters of the modernist movement frequently approached it. They found that pure color was at the center of the visual conundrum of modern art... Mercedes, on the other hand, was more interested in the atmospheric qualities of color and in the effect tonalities, contrasts and harmonies had on the mood of the viewer, always in an intuitive way, devoid of any methodology or system."
Regarding Pardo's work in printmaking, Santana remarks, "As pure color became the central axis of her pictorial investigation, this graphical technique offered her the possibility of experimenting with more intense, saturated and bright colors and with subtle differences in tone and contrast, which were more difficult to achieve with other media... We feel astonished as we appreciate for the first time a color, an unusual color whose existence was unknown to us, that the artist throws into our visual field with the purpose of evoking new sensations and feelings."
The thirty-year breadth of the works on view in the exhibition allow one to chart Pardo's investigations into color and the development of her own organic, intuitive geometric language that differentiated her from the fixed geometry of her male counterparts. In her early serigraphs of the late 1960s, Pardo employs large blocks of color that dominate the pictorial plane. As she progressed, she experiments with increasingly layered and dynamic compositions that favor the interaction of loose geometric forms, which come to a climax in her mature work of the 1990s in which we see her most playful interplay of forms. Throughout the decades, we see her hallmark brilliance of color pairings and, often-times, subtle shifts in gradients of blues or reds that are just barely discernable to the eye.
Pardo’s works are represented in several major collections, including Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC), Caracas, Venezuela and New York City, New York, USA; Fundación Banco Mercantil, Caracas, Venezuela; Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN), Caracas, Venezuela; and Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela, among others.
Opening reception: Thursday, May 18, 6-8pm
Exhibition dates: May 18 - July 6, 2023
For an exhibition preview, contact Mónica Hernández at monica@sicardi.com and 832-921-7014, or call the gallery at 713-529-1313.