Artist Profile | Modern Art

Pablo Reinoso

Pablo Reinoso (born in Buenos Aires in 1955) is a French-Argentinian artist who has lived and worked in Paris since 1978. The artist’s practice encompasses sculpture, installation, design, architecture and painting, striving to challenge and extend the formal and conceptual boundaries of these mediums. Since the 1970s, Pablo Reinoso has developed a body of works structured in series that address the notion of materiality, questioning and subverting the nature and limits of materials and techniques as diverse as wood, bronze, marble, steel, textile and air. His research also revolves around the ideas of object and functionality, whose relationship is constantly interrogated and reshaped through his works. By using materials as diverse as construction elements or existing objects from both architecture and design, his sculptures contribute to reconfigure these mediums’ primary functions, beyond their immediate context of use. Since the 2000s, the artist’s research has largely focused on the seating object through his series "Thoneteando","Spaghetti benches" as well as "Garabatos".   The notion of space is also central to Pablo Reinoso’s works. Often created in-situ, his sculptures entertain a profound relationship with the environments they are designed for: within both natural and urban settings, they question our perception and our ways of being in space. Often monumental, they are deeply rooted in public spaces, thus incorporating by their very nature a significant social dimension. Interactive, these works encourage user interaction, creating new opportunities for exchange, conversation or encounter. Over the past few years, the artist has created large-scale projects for public and prestigious locations, notably in Lyon ( Nouages , 2013), at the Palais de l'Elysée ( Racines de France , 2016), in London ( We Watch You Too  and  Only Children's Bench , 2016), in Buenos Aires ( Aires de Buenos Aires , 2019) or in South Korea ( Busan Infinity Line , 2019).   Sensitive to contemporary issues and most notably to the climate crisis, Pablo Reinoso’s recent works address environmental concerns, questioning the relationship between human and natural ecosystems. Among his most recognizable works, the Spaghetti Benches are above all a tribute to plant intelligence, to the modes of existence that vegetal life adopts to perpetuate its growth.   Since 2020, the artist has also developed a body of paintings, pursuing his formal and conceptual research through an entirely new medium. By exploring the pictorial surface through the materiality of the ink, he creates black and white compositions that evoke organic shapes and forms in contraction and expansion. Blending both figurative and abstract elements, these paintings evoke life on a microscopic scale, a life that emerges directly from the pictorial surface, spilling over onto the next sheet, following a movement of growth which also underpins the artist’s sculptural work.   From May 1st through September 4th, 2022, Pablo Reinoso's work will be featured as part of a major exhibition at the Château de Chambord. The show will span across the castle’s interior and gardens, with new sculptures, as well as several in-situ, large-scale installations created specifically for the exhibition. His work has been shown in international institutions and as part of major exhibitions, including the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Centre Georges Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, the Grassi Museum in Liepzig, the Boghossian Foundation in Brussels, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Tokyo, the MUDAC in Lausanne, the CID - Centre for Innovation and Design in Grand-Hornu, the Venice Biennale, the FIAC Hors-les-murs, the Bienalsur or AGORA, the Bordeaux Biennale. His works are part of the collections of the MALBA and the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires, the National Fund of Contemporary Art of Paris, the Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, the MACRO Rosario or the MUSAC of Leon in Spain.