This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Doris Salcedo.
Born: 1958, Colombia
Died: NA
Country most active: Colombia
Also known as: NA
For decades, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has been at the forefront of artmaking that seeks to provide space for mourning, grieving, and memory. Working directly with families of victims in collecting testimony and remembrances, Salcedo has taken on the task of investigating violence in Colombia and beyond, interpreting these experiences and translating them into abstracted yet impactful visual forms.
Early Childhood and Personal Life
Very little is known of Doris Salcedo’s childhood or personal life. She keeps these matters private, and very rarely talks about them in interviews, preferring to keep the focus on her art. As she puts it, “my work needs to speak on its own.” Because of this, art historian María Alexandra Cabrera has called her “the master of silence.”
What we can tell is that Salcedo’s calling to be an artist had existed since a young age and that the experience of growing up in war-torn Colombia was formative (The Colombian Civil War, a recurrent subject in her work, lasted from approximately 1948 to 2016). Of her desire to become an artist, she said, “I cannot name a date when that came to me; it has always been there.” She later reflected on how everyday experience shaped her art: “Living […] in a country at war means that war does not give you the possibility of distance,” she said, “War engulfs reality completely. […] It throws a shadow over your entire life.”
Education and Early Career
In 1980, Salcedo earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in Bogotá, where she studied painting and theatre. Her most influential teacher there was Colombian artist Beatriz González, who often incorporates found objects (such as furniture) in her work, something Salcedo would adopt in her own practice. From González, she absorbed the idea that “art does not come from imagination, but reality” and that research was an important component of artmaking. During her undergraduate years, Salcedo became involved in theater and performance and even worked for a time designing stage sets. She noted that “it was in the Colombian theatre of that time, with its political overtones, that my interests in art and politics came together.”
Looking back on her art education in Colombia, Salcedo reflected that “it took place on the fringes,” at a time when the country was “largely cut off from the rest of the world.” However, such a condition led to a deep desire to study and make “connections with the world outside.” “Paradoxically,” she remarked, “one can end up gaining access to information and achieving quite a sophisticated education.”
An early encounter with the work of Francisco Goya through reproductions in Colombia and then in person during a trip to Europe left a lasting impact on her. “Goya is present in all of my work,” she said in a 2021 interview. It was through Goya’s work that Salcedo realized the power of art to “[look] in the face of horrors,” referring to Goya’s empathetic depictions of political violence and executions in his own time.
After her undergraduate degree, Salcedo relocated to New York and, in 1984, earned a Master of Fine Arts from New York University (with the support of an Icetex scholarship for international studies from the Colombian government). In New York, she became enamored with Joseph Beuys’s sculptural works, which turned utilitarian objects into artworks imbued with sociopolitical meanings. She said, “I found the possibility of integrating my political awareness with sculpture. I discovered how materials have the capacity to convey specific meaning.”
In the US, Salcedo reflected, “another important experience was coming to terms with being a foreigner. What does it mean to be a foreigner? What does it mean to be displaced?” After her studies, she returned to Bogotá. She said that “When I returned to Colombia, I continued to live like an outsider because this gave me the distance that one needs to be critical of the society to which one belongs.” Salcedo became a professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, where she taught sculpture and art theory as she steadily built her career as an artist and teacher.
On November 6, 1985, while leaving from a nearby library, Salcedo witnessed the Palace of Justice siege in Bogotá, when members of the M-19 guerrilla group took the Supreme Court of Colombia hostage, and set fire to hundreds of documents, leading to the building itself catching fire. The takeover resulted in military intervention, the (still unsolved) disappearance of a dozen people, and the deaths of over 100 people, including twelve magistrates and five M-19 leaders, as well as cafeteria workers, and some still-unidentified bodies. Salcedo recalled, “I am not left with just a visual memory, but a terrible memory of the smell of the burning building with human beings inside. It left its mark on me.” The experience strengthened Salcedo’s resolve to find a means of helping to make stories of victims known.
Mature Period
With her desire to give space for the silenced, Salcedo developed a “spare and potent” sculptural language, as art critic Ben Luke puts it. In an early, untitled work, she encased white shirts in plaster and used steel rebars to pierce through them. The work referred to the massacre of workers at two banana plantations in 1988, although Salcedo intended it to be read metaphorically for a broader resonance as well. Such a format of encased everyday objects shown in repetition, with allusions to violence through their modifications, would become a base format for her mature works.
Since the late 1980s, Salcedo has traveled around Colombia visiting abandoned villages, execution sites, concentration camps, and mass graves. During these trips, she interviews relatives of individuals who “disappeared,” presumably at the hands of the military when the country was embroiled in an ongoing civil war, as well as the government’s war on drugs. Salcedo explains that she tries to “be as close to [her subjects] as possible.” “I try to learn absolutely everything about their lives, their trajectories, as if I were a detective piecing together the scene of a crime,” she says. Through the process she develops a deep empathy that she translates into visual form: “I can’t really describe what happens to me because it’s not rational: in a way, I become that person, there is a process of substitution. Their suffering becomes mine.” According to Tate Modern, much of her work deals with the fact that, while the death of a loved one can be mourned, their disappearance leaves an unbearable emptiness. Her work deals with not only the question of mourning, but, as she said, “an inability to mourn.”
Salcedo has received many honors and awards throughout her career, including a Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Grant in 1995. She is married to Colombian novelist and sociologist Azriel Bibliowicz, whose work investigates the Jewish experience in Colombia. The couple currently lives and works in Bogotá.
The Legacy of Doris Salcedo
In the aftermath of Minimalism and Conceptual Art, a major strand of contemporary art privileged cerebral and aesthetic engagement rather than an artwork’s emotional punch. Salcedo’s work shifted contemporary sculpture into the difficult terrain of memory and trauma. Arts writer Caroline Goldstein notes, “Salcedo’s works are subtle, though they pack a huge emotional charge.” Similarly, curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm asserts that Salcedo’s work “signals a return to feeling in contemporary art – it’s O.K. to have emotions in front of an artwork.” At the same time, what is particularly impactful about the affective charge of Salcedo’s work is its understatedness and quiet power. As art historian Giovanni Aloi remarks, in Salcedo, “sculptures appear equally defined by the materiality that constituted them and the silence that wrapped them.”
In the aftermath of World War II and other revelations of atrocities and human loss, there have been ongoing discussions and artworks made on the theme of violence, trauma, and memory in twentieth-century art. A key question facing artists has been how to represent such traumatic events and suffering – and how to do so ethically. Salcedo’s work tackles this question in a late twentieth-century context and provides an example of how to negotiate what is representable and speakable (or not), as the art critic Elizabeth Adan writes. Unlike artists such as Christian Boltanski, who creates complex and oftentimes dramatic installations, Salcedo stands out for her strategy of representation befitting her subject, providing, as she puts it, both a “confrontation” and an “embrace […] at the threshold where absence makes itself present.” Her work contributes to the tradition of the monument at a point when grand monumental sculptures no longer hold appeal. Instead, she provides a monument that is “never set” but “leaves a memory.”
Many contemporary artists have taken a cue from Salcedo’s works. Brooklyn-based artist Jeanne Heifetz cites Salcedo as an important influence at the midpoint of her career, stating that Salcedo “made me wonder whether artists have an obligation to make work about things that frighten us.” This realization led Heifetz to develop her 2016-17 series, Pre-Occupied, which engages with her own fear of death. American artist Melissa Joseph cites Salcedo as an influence on her practice, which focuses on “collective memory and shared experiences, themes of diaspora, family histories, and the politics of how we occupy spaces.” Meanwhile, Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo draws on Salcedo’s example and creates works that focus on the experience of being a third-world woman at the “zenith of conflicts that are as local as they are universal.”