Alfredo Jaar

Alfredo Jaar, born in Santiago de Chile in 1956, is an artist as well as an architect and filmmaker. Challenging commonly held preconceptions of the relationship between art and politics, Jaar fuses the aesthetic and the ethical in order to focus on the world’s injustice: poverty, exploitation, genocide. Jaar’s projects are often presented as complex yet calculatedly minimalist installations comprised of found objects, posters, projected images, reflective surfaces, and photo-text pieces. As public interventions and performances many of his projects also involve audience participation. Jaar’s projects are aimed at illustrating the corresponding effects that international economic and political realities have on the lives of individuals.

Alfredo Jaar received his training at the Instituto Chileno Norteamericano de Cultura and the University of Chile. Alfredo Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world. To date more than fifty monographic publications have been published on his work. Jaar became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. In 2020, he was awarded the Hasselblad Award. In 2018, he received the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize. In 2006, he received Spain’s Premio Extremadura a la Creación. He has participated in the Biennal of Venice (1986; 2007; 2009; 2013), São Paulo (1985; 1987; 2010), Sydney (1990), Istanbul (1995), and Johannesburg (1997), as well as in documenta (1987; 2002). Retrospectives of his work were organised in 2012 in Berlin by the Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, in 2014 at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, and in 2015/16 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Marseille. Important solo exhibitions include SESC Pompeia, São Paulo, Brazil (2021), MAK Vienna, Austria (2021), Zeitz MOCAA, Cape Town, South Africa (2020), Synagogue-Stommeln, Pulheim, Germany (2019), Yorkshire Sculpture Garden, UK (2017), Wits Art Museum, Johannesburg, South Africa (2016). Crucial group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial (2022), Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2022), Fundación Jumex, City of Mexico (2020), Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, Sweden (2019), Nasjonalmuseet, Oslo, Norway (2018), Imperial War Museum, London (2017). His work is in many public collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou, LACMA, Museo de Artes Visuales, Santiago, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montréal, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, MACBA, National Gallery of Canada, and Tate Modern. The new permanent comission, Padiglione Rosso (Red Pavillion) opened in September 2022 in CityLife Park, Milan, Italy. Alfredo Jaar lives and works in New York City.