The prestigious Art Icon award, now in its twelfth year, celebrates the work of an artist deemed to have made a profound contribution to the artistic landscape. The 2025 award will be presented to the Colombian artist, Doris Salcedo, at a special Gala celebration held at Whitechapel Gallery on 3 March 2025. The evening will be hosted by Whitechapel Gallery Director, Gilane Tawadros and Chair of trustees, David Dibosa.
Doris Salcedo (b. 1958, Bogotá) is a leading voice in contemporary art, known for her arresting sculptural and installation works that engage with themes of political violence, trauma and loss. Drawing on her own experience of Colombia’s turbulent political history while also reflecting broader global concerns, Salcedo creates monumental yet intimate spaces for individual and collective mourning, giving form to the invisibility of peoples marginalised by war, migration, and poverty. Her practice is informed by a rigorous research process, which often involves spending time with remote rural communities, and draws on a range of resources including philosophy, literature and poetry. She describes her art as a “topology of mourning,” importantly bearing witness to lives erased or diminished by political agendas.
Through meticulously crafted, elegiac installations, such as Atrabiliarios (1992-2004), displaying the worn shoes (mostly womens’) of “disappeared” people; Shibboleth (2007), a ravine like crack that split the floor of Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall; Palimpsest (2013-17), a floor of rectangular stone slabs seemingly weeping the names of refugees who drowned attempting dangerous sea crossings; A Flor de Piel (2014), a vast shroud composed of stitched rose petals honouring a Colombian nurse who endured brutal captivity and murder, and the more recent Uprooted (2020-22), a house-like structure made out of 800 dead trees, which, through its inability to offer real shelter, addresses the increasingly uninhabitable nature of the world, Salcedo gives startling visibility to the deep scars political assault leaves on individuals and societies. In a world primed to forget, or to silence violence, Salcedo has developed an ethical and powerful visual language for addressing oppression and injustice; one which does not graphically reenact or represent the violence but gives voice to the voiceless and speaks the unspeakable.
Whitechapel Gallery Director, Gilane Tawadros commented:
“I am delighted to announce Doris Salcedo as our 2025 Art Icon. Throughout her career, Salcedo has made powerful and compelling works of art that address themes of violence, exclusion and human rights, drawing attention to human tragedy. Her work gives form to pain, trauma and loss in a way which is intimate and humane, enabling us to connect on an individual and collective level that contrasts strikingly with media accounts of human suffering. For the artist, “every work of art is political, because every work of art is breaking new ground’. At a time when conflict and violence continues to erupt with grim reverberations across the globe, Doris Salcedo’s work has never felt more resonant and important, acting as a beacon for how art can illuminate our shared humanity and offer a much needed space for reflection, remembrance and mourning.”
There will be an accompanying online auction of artworks donated by leading contemporary artists to raise valuable funds for the Gallery. Proceeds will support Whitechapel Gallery’s Exhibitions and participation programmes, designed to inspire and develop a new generation of artists.
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For more information, interviews and images, contact:
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Notes for Editors:
About Art Icon:
About Doris Salcedo:
Doris Salcedo was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1958 where she continues to live and work. Her solo exhibitions include Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2023); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2022); Glenstone, Travilah, Maryland (2022); Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lubbeck, Germany (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2017); Harvard Art Museums, Massachusetts (2016); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, touring to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2015–16); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2014); Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico, touring to Moderna Museet Malmö, Sweden, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, White Cube, London and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2011–13); Tate Modern, London (2007); Camden Arts Centre, London (2001); Tate Britain, London (1999); and New Museum, New York (1998).
About Whitechapel Gallery:
Whitechapel Gallery was founded in 1901 with the aim to bring great art to the people of East London. From the outset, the Gallery has pushed forward a bold programme of exhibitions and educational activities, driven by the desire to enrich the cultural offer for local communities and provide new opportunities for extraordinary artists from across the globe, to showcase their works to UK audiences, often for the first time.
From ground-breaking solo shows from artists as diverse as Barbara Hepworth (1954), Jackson Pollock (1958), Helio Oiticica (1969), Gilbert & George (1971), Eva Hesse (1979), Frida Kahlo (1982), Sonia Boyce (1988), Sophie Calle (2010), Zarina Bhimji (2012), Emily Jacir (2015), William Kentridge (2016), Theaster Gates (2021), Nicole Eisenman (2023), Zineb Sedira, Gavin Jantjes and Lygia Clark ( 2024) to thought-provoking group exhibitions that reflect key artistic and cultural concerns, the Gallery’s focus on bringing artists, ideas, and audiences together, remains as important today as it did over a century ago and has helped to cement the East End, as one of the world’s most exciting and diverse cultural quarters.
Under the Directorship of Gilane Tawadros (appointed in 2022), Whitechapel Gallery continues to build on its pioneering history as a locally embedded, globally connected home for contemporary art, proposing a distinctive and bold space for diverse artists, ideas and audiences to come together an.
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