Doris Salcedo

Salcedo's precise, economical installations suffuse domestic materials with layers of political meaning

Experiences of violence and loss take shape in the work of internationally acclaimed Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (born 1958). Although her sculptures and installations have been inspired by her own biography (members of her own family were among the many people who have disappeared in Colombia), Salcedo's art appeals to universal feelings of grief, trauma, alienation and uprooting. Rarely do individual pain and collective mourning find such a heartfelt expression in art.
Using commonplace and domestic objects such as wooden furniture, clothing, concrete, grass, hair and rose petals, Salcedo subtly transforms them by charging them with meaning and highlighting the painfully absent. Coedited by the artist herself and featuring more than 100 key works from different phases of her career between 1992 and 2021, this catalog is an unrivaled study of Salcedo's work of the past three decades.