Carlos Basualdo: Doris Salcedo (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series)

With work in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate, London, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (b.1958) is one of today’s most internationally respected South American sculptors. Inspired as much by poetry and philosophy as by the affecting material qualities of sculpture, Salcedo subtly and painstakingly transforms everyday household objects and garments – symbols of a vanished existence and of the human tragedies that are its cause. In Atrabiliaros (1991-6) abandoned shoes of ‘disappeared’ Colombian people, half-concealed behind membranes of animal fibre, become ghost-like symbols of mourning. In Salcedo’s ongoing untitled works, wooden furnishings, worn by long use and filled with concrete, mutely evoke the lives they once served.