Pedro Pedro, Pile of Fruit with Grapes, Tomatoes, a Peeled Lemon and Orange, 2024; Original Painting

**These original works are available via private sale only. Please email hello@artforchange.com with your interest. 

Pedro Pedro’s paintings—often depicting fruit bowls, lavish spreads of food, and clothes chaotically strewn about—parody the still-life form. The artist transforms quotidian objects, such as a sock or a half-eaten sandwich, into spirited characters within vibrant scenes that evoke the colorful, grotesque figurations of Peter Saul as well as the compositional considerations of Old Master painters. Defined by bold colors rendered through the application of textile paint onto unprimed linen, Pedro’s style feels simultaneously humorous and classical. The resulting compositions of untidy objects suggest the harried, contemporary lives lived just beyond their frames. Based in Los Angeles, the artist has presented work at venues that include Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles, CA; The Hole, New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA; Hashimoto Contemporary, San Francisco, CA; and New Image Art, Los Angeles, CA.

Pedro Pedro
Pile of Fruit with Grapes, Tomatoes, a Peeled Lemon and Orange, 2024
Textile paint on linen
48 x 36 inches

Riffing on the traditional genres of still-life portraiture, Pile of Fruit with Grapes, Tomatoes, a Peeled Lemon and Orange (2022) and Pears, Peach, Grapes, Apple, Strawberries and Plums (2022) each depict overfilling groupings of colorful fruits and vegetables. Situated within planes flattened and devoid of all other details, the jumbled assemblages insinuate an unknown human presence that feels simultaneously frantic and playful. Within his practice, Pedro begins each painting by assembling a study and a digital collage, before recreating the image on raw linen. Relying on intuition, the artist then applies a thin layer of dye paint to build out the underpaintings and backgrounds, before finally adding textile paints until the images feel complete.

With environmental conservation a central tenet of ART FOR CHANGE’s mission, the artists invited for this exhibition confront and contribute to the move toward sustainability by exploring nature and the environment through content, methods, inspiration, or process. In conjunction with the exhibition, ART FOR CHANGE and Phillips will plant 1,000 trees to help counter the CO2 emissions produced by the art industry.

For this collaboration between Phillips and ART FOR CHANGE, Pedro notes, “I draw my inspiration from nature, therefore I consider the preservation of our planet to be a key component of my work.”