Doris Salcedo is the recipient of the Nasher Sculpture Center’s first $100,000 Nasher Prize. “Through her use of meaningful, everyday materials, often in unexpected and socially-charged public spaces in her native Colombia and elsewhere around the world, Doris Salcedo has created a body of work that is both aesthetically striking and politically resonant,” says Nasher Sculpture Center director Jeremy Strick. (more…)
Doris Salcedo, From Unland series (Installation View), all photos via Osman Yerebakan for Art Observed
Visiting the Doris Salcedo retrospective currently on view at the Guggenheim through October 12th, attendees may experience a peculiar bitterness, stemming from poignance of Salcedo’s historically expansive and emotionally profound body of work. Everyday commodities, from shoes to chairs, play a key role in Salcedo’s spacious installations covering multiple floors of the museum’s Tower Galleries. With their visually mute yet bleak façades, mundane objects assembled in distinct orchestrations venture into profound narratives, reflecting Salcedo’s meticulous study on consequences of political turmoil in her country and around the globe, often exploring the tragic, human cost of political turbulence, revolt and oppression.
Haegue Yang, Sellim (2009), via Art Observed
Currently on view at MoMA through April of next year, Scenes for a New Heritage: Contemporary Art from the Collection offers a carefully balanced rumination on the processes and practices that have defined the past three decades of contemporary art. Looking back at a diverse series of explorations into the political, visual and spatial interests of artists and their recent practices, the show is a remarkably broad rumination on contemporary art today, one that feels particularly strong during the summer gallery lull in New York. (more…)