Stainless Steel 2004-2005 Fogg Museum, Harvard University
A painful and incomprehensible emptiness, the aftermath of some unknown, violent occurrence, is suggested by Doris Salcedo’s Untitled chair. Salcedo often employs chairs, in large aggregations or singly, suggesting a human presence–even an entire community–that has been damaged beyond repair.
Says Salcedo: “Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life…then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.”[6]
The Untitled chair is roughly contemporaneous with Istanbul, an installation of 1500 chairs piled between two buildings. Salcedo means Istanbul to represent mass graves of anonymous victims, and it is redolent of the Holocaust as well as more recent horrors of wartime violence and chaos. Salcedo lives and works in her home city of Bogota, Colombia; it is a rare moment of grace to see her sculpture here in New England.
Visit “Untitled” at the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.
Istanbul pictures, description: https://mymodernmet.com/doris-salcedo-1550-chairs-stacked/
A working sculptor 