Mercedes Pardo

Biography

In 1952, at the Galerie Suzanne Michel in Paris, in the room called Espace Lumière, Mercedes Pardo’s abstract works hung beside paintings by Alejandro Otero, Jesús Soto, Carmelo Arden Quin and several other artists. For the Venezuelan it was one of her first appearances on the European scene.

She was born in Caracas, in the parish of La Pastora. The date of her birth is given differently: most often 29 July 1921, but 20 July by other accounts. Her childhood was spent in Caracas, on Margarita Island and in Los Teques. At thirteen she began attending free classes at the Academy of Fine Arts, and in 1941 she entered the School of Plastic and Applied Arts in Caracas. A year later, at the Third Official Salon, she received her first distinction: an honourable mention for painting. In 1944 she was awarded the José Loreto Arismendi Prize.

In 1947 she went to Santiago, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts there and held her first solo exhibition. In 1949 she moved to Paris and studied at the École du Louvre and, according to some accounts, in the studio of André Lhote. In 1951 she married the painter Alejandro Otero in London and returned to Venezuela the same year, where she took part in the “International Exhibition of Abstract Art” at the Cuatro Muros gallery. The middle of the 1950s brought a change in her manner. Around 1956 she produced works with a thick layer of paint, which critics call pre-Informalist, but she soon concentrated on the search for colour effects. At about the same time she began working for the theatre: the first production was “Intervalo” by Elizabeth Schön at the Teatro Nacional in Caracas. In 1959 she founded the educational department of the Museum of Fine Arts in Caracas and went to the 5th São Paulo Biennial.

In 1962 her work was shown at the Venice Biennale. That year also produced the series of monotypes “Huellas” (“Traces”), for which she rolled nuts, nails and paper clips across the paper. Together with José María Cruxent she showed 36 paintings in transparent colours at the Museum of Fine Arts, softer in tone than her earlier work. In the same year Pardo became one of the founders of the Cooperative School in San Antonio de Los Altos, now the Community School, and ran craft workshops there. A Paris period, in which she painted abstract watercolours with a lyrical line, drips and stains, is also linked with 1960; how this fits with the rest of the chronology I have not been able to check.

Awards followed one after another. In 1960 she received the Puebla de Bolívar Prize, and in 1961 the prize of the Fina Gómez Foundation. In 1964 she shared the National Prize for Applied Arts with Otero. In 1966 she won a prize for enamel at the International Exhibition of Artistic Crafts in Stuttgart. She was given the National Prize of Plastic Arts in 1978. In 1980 her print was bought for the collection at the “World Print III” competition in San Francisco.

She did a great deal of work with children. In 1972 she founded and ran a children’s workshop of artistic expression at the Mendoza Foundation; in 1974 she worked in the children’s workshops of the Banco del Libro in poor districts of Caracas and was an adviser to the Children’s Foundation. In 1979 a stage curtain of three hundred square metres was made from her design for the Teatro Municipal in Caracas, and Fundarte issued a series of screenprints after it. In the mid-1980s she began the series “Suite cubista”.

She exhibited widely: in Madrid, Mexico City, New York, Maracaibo and Valencia. In 1979 the National Art Gallery in Caracas organised a retrospective of her work from 1952 to 1978, and in 1991 an anthological exhibition, “Moradas del color” (“Abodes of Colour”). In 2004, at the Ibero-American Art Fair, Pardo described herself as “the colourist”; a book, “La utopía privada de Mercedes Pardo” (“The Private Utopia of Mercedes Pardo”), appeared to mark the occasion.

She died on 24 March 2005 in San Antonio de Los Altos. The house where she and Otero lived has housed a foundation in their names since 2016. In 2023 her work was shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in the exhibition “Action, Gesture, Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940–1970”.