Colombian artist, Doris Salcedo (*1958), receives the first Possehl Prize for International Art in Lübeck in 2019.
The internationally renowned artist Doris Salcedo (b. 1958) works with objects, sculptures and large site-specific installations to explore the effects of violence and marginalization in her native Colombia and other regions of the world. According to the international jury, Salcedo finds "poetic images for political ruling systems, racism and systematic discrimination," and her work is "of the highest relevance to our present time." Seven female and five male artists from nine nations had been put forward in the run-up by an international nominating committee. Salcedo's first solo exhibition in Germany was on view from 7th September to 3rd November 2019 at Kunsthalle St. Annen (St. Annen Art Gallery) in Lübeck. The award ceremony took place at the opening on 7th September, the prize is valued at 25,000 euros.
Fragile art against forgetting
Salcedo’s work begins...where others would turn away: her sculptures and installations tackle, with great sensitivity, the tragic consequences of violence as a result of dominant political and economic power structures, by leading the viewer into the emotional lives of victims and their families. Her homeland of Colombia, which has been in a permanent state of what amounts to civil war for five decades, is the starting point for numerous projects, such as the alienating "La Casa Viuda" (1992-1995), which takes the familiar details of domestic everyday life (such as furniture or clothing) and creates a sense of mourning for the loss of loved ones and also, in the room itself, a loss of home. At the eighth Istanbul Biennale (held in 2003), she created a stack of 1,500 second-hand chairs in the narrow gap between two houses in the quarter once inhabited by the city’s Greek and Jewish minorities. In 2007, she took on Europe’s treatment of migrants with "Shibboleth" (at the Tate Modern in London), by questioning – with a long, deep crack in the concrete floor of the Turbine Hall – the mechanisms of division and marginalization of the so-called “First World". Works such as "A Flor de Piel" (2011-2012), a large expanse of pressed rose petals, delicately sewn together, and "Plegaria Muda" (2008-2010), stacked wooden tables with fine sprigs of grass growing from them, address the strength, beauty and fragility of life; in terms of both its meaning and its evocation of the sad fates of individuals.
The Kunsthalle St. Annen Lübeck was the first art gallery in Germany showing Salcedo's artwork in a solo exhibition.
Entrada actualizada el el 27 dic de 2019
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