20 Facts About Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo was born on 1958 and is a Colombian-born visual artist and sculptor.

Doris Salcedo's work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia and is generally composed of commonplace items such as wooden furniture, clothing, concrete, grass, and rose petals.

Doris Salcedo completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in 1980, before traveling to New York City, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University in 1984.

Doris Salcedo then returned to Bogota to teach at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia.

In pieces such as Unland: The Orphan's Tunic from 1997 and the La Casa Viuda series from the early 1990s, Doris Salcedo takes ordinary household items, such as a chair and table, and transforms them into memorials for victims of the Civil War in Colombia.

Again, in a 1998 interview with Charles Merewether, Doris Salcedo expounds upon this notion of the metamorphosis, describing the experience of the viewer with her own artistic repair or restoration of the past.

Doris Salcedo employs objects from the past, objects imbued with an important sense of history and, through these contemporary memory sculptures, illustrates the flow of time.

Doris Salcedo uses gallery spaces or unusual locations to create art and environments that are politically and historically charged.

Doris Salcedo placed this piece in the new Palace of Justice.

Doris Salcedo's goal was to re-inhabit the space that was forgotten.

In 2005, at the Castello di Rivoli, Doris Salcedo reworked one of the institution's major rooms by extending the existing vaulted brick ceiling of the gallery.

Doris Salcedo installed the set of 1001 Ming and Qing dynasty chairs at Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany, one chair for each of the 1001 Chinese travelers displaced.

Doris Salcedo's piece focused on Chinese displacement, a similar topic to Salcedo.

Doris Salcedo describes this a being "permanently suspended between the present and the past".

Doris Salcedo was the first artist to change the physical building.

Doris Salcedo used this piece to give voice to the victims of all the injustices that have separated people and armed them against one another.

Doris Salcedo said that breaking open the floor of Turbine Hall symbolized the fracture in modernity itself.

Doris Salcedo created the piece in 2013, working with rose petals and thread as her materials; A Flor de Piel was acquired by the Harvard Art Museums in 2014.

Since 1988 Doris Salcedo has interviewed people whose relatives have been "disappeared" by presumably order of the military associated with Colombia's civil war and illegal drug trade.

Doris Salcedo is most interested in how they vary from one another because they are always there just presented in different forms.