Chile Awards the National Art Prize to Alfredo Jaar
Chile awarded the National Art Prize to Alfredo Jaar (b.1956; Santiago, Chile). “This prize –explains the art critic, curator and poet Antonio Arévalo- was born during the government of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda in 1940 and consists of both prize money, and a pension for life.
It’s an institutional reward that gives an honor to the work (art, literature, music, and visual art) of great artists who contribute to the development of culture in Chile”.
Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. With an expansive commitment to art in diverse and distinctive cultural, political, and public contexts, his work has been commissioned, exhibited, and installed throughout the world, including Biennales in Venice (1987, 2002), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010), and Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). Solo exhibitions include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Whitechapel, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. Most recently, a major retrospective of the artist’s work took place at three major cultural institutions in Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Neue Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst, and Alte Nationalgalerie.
His most recent public projects include La geometría de la conciencia (The Geometry of Conscience), a memorial next to the new Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, and the Park of the Laments in a new contemplative space adjacent to the Indianapolis Museum of Art. His many awards and recognitions include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 1985 and, in 2000 he was a recipient of the prestigious five-year MacArthur Fellowship. In 2006, he received Spain’s Premio Extremadura a la Creación.
In 1982 he immigrated to New York, where he began to participate in major exhibitions. He is participating at the 55th Venice Biennale representing the Chilean national pavilion.
“His artistic research -based on complex issues and often silenced by media, like war, violence, inequalities- is able to question the political and economic systems in force, showing a contradiction that is often invisible”, says Arévalo.
The choice for the award was unanimous, given his “systematic idea about new languages and universal themes in the field of visual arts. Jaar is an artist that breaks usual visual codes, is able to create an art made of emotion and thoughts, through the creation of new visual languages”, according the jury of the Chilean National Art Prize.
September 11, the overthrow and death anniversary of Salvador Allende, Alfredo Jaar realized an action transmitted via the Internet that consisted of a fixed camera, filming the the normality of life in El Palacio de la Moneda, “like a confrontational mirror of the space that 40 years ago was a violent display of bombings and the overthrow of a president”, explained Antonio Arévalo.
