An heiress and an artist have transformed a tired building in Arles into an eccentric experiment in design. By Claire Wrathall
Not quite four years ago, the Cuban-born American artist Jorge Pardo took an unexpected call from Maja Hoffmann, art-loving heiress to the Hoffmann-La Roche pharmaceuticals fortune. 'I have a hotel for you!' she told him. 'Come to Arles and take a look at it.'
'Maja had been buying my work for some time,” says Pardo, whose light installations and prints can be found in major public collections, not least New York’s Museum of Modern Art and London’s Tate Modern. 'I’d done a project for her London house. And she was always talking about Arles and how we were going to do something there.'
Image: © Francois Halard
November 15 2018
