Alfredo Jaar | Galerie Lelong

The Silence of Nduwayezu, 1997

Alfredo Jaar is an uncompromising and innovative artist, architect, and filmmaker. For over 40 years, Jaar has used photographs, film, installation, and new media to create compelling works that examine complex socio-political issues and the limits and ethics of representation. By using a hybrid form of art-making, Jaar has consistently provoked, questioned, and searched for ways to heighten our consciousness about issues often forgotten or suppressed in the international sphere, while not relinquishing art’s formal and aesthetic power. Over his career, Jaar has explored significant political and social issues including genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and the balance of power between developing and industrialized nations.
"In thirty years I have never been capable of creating a work of art purely from my imagination—a little drawing, a little object, nothing. Show me anything from my work over the past thirty years, of the thousands of pieces I've done, something, anything, a John Cage kind of gesture, for example, something by chance, I don't know. It doesn't exist; I don't know how to do that. Everything is based on reality."

—Alfredo Jaar
A Hundred Times Nguyen, 1994. Photo: Kenichi Hanada.

Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice, Italy (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013); São Paulo, Brazil (1987, 1989, 2010); Documenta, Germany (1987, 2002); the Whitney Biennial (2022). In 2020, Jaar was the recipient of the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography, the most prestigious award for photography in the world. Jaar was awarded the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize in 2019, and a solo exhibition was presented in 2023. Other major recent surveys of his work have taken place at the MCA Chicago; Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts, France; Hangar Bicocca, Italy; Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.V., Germany; Rencontres d’Arles, France; and Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Finland. His work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles Museum of Art, California; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Tate Modern, England; Centre Georges Pompidou, France; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; M+, Hong Kong; and dozens of other institutions worldwide.

Jaar was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1956 and has been based in New York City since 1982.

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- Events
  THE TEMPTATION TO EXIST
  Exhibition walkthrough with Alfredo Jaar and Carlos Basualdo 14 May 2022
- Events
  Galerie Lelong: Dialogues
  Making Visible the Invisible with Alfredo Jaar and Koyo Kouoh 25 February 2021
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