Lot 54: Doris Salcedo (b. 1958)

Camisas blancas (From the series Camisas blancas) shirts, gesso and iron bar Height: 4ft. (122cm. approx.) Executed in 1991-1993 PROVENANCE Private collection, New York LITERATURE Cameron, D. "Absence Makes the Art: Doris Salcedo", Artforum, New York, No. 33, October 1994, p. 91, n.n. (illustrated) Princenthal, N. et al. Doris Salcedo, Phaidon Press Limited, London, 2000, p. 45-49, n.n. (other examples illustrated in color) EXHIBITION Venice, XLV Venice Biennale (group), "Aperto 93: Emergency/Emergenza", Edizioni La Biennale di Venezia, n.p., n.n. Amsterdam, Stiching De Appel, The Spine, 1994, n.p., n.n. NOTES One of the strong aspects of Salcedo's work is the subtle manipulation of common objects: chairs, tables, furniture, shoes, shirts, among others, are transformed through nuanced mediations into mementos of life, death, history and violence. Camisas blancas partakes of Salcedo's predilection for indistinct and general things that bespeak of a vernacular universality shared by all human beings. The white shirt worn by so many becomes in this work an empty symbol, empty precisely because of its ubiquity, that gives spatial and psychological force to the violent gesture of the iron bar traversing the neatly folded shirts throughout. The spear cutting through the shoulder might have become in our filmic culture a clich‚, emptied too, but this time by repetition, of the heroic death of the soldier or warrior in battle, but displaced and subdued in Salcedo's work it acquires the restrained poignancy of those increasingly scarcely successful monuments to the avatars of local history. M¢nic Amor New York, 2002.