Chilean artist, architect, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar has recently received the National Visual Arts Award, including a monetary award of 18'155,000 Chilean pesos and a 20 UTM lifetime pension (approximately 800,000 pesos per month).
Jaar was born in Santiago in 1956 and studied film at the Instituto Chileno-Norteamericano de Cultura, in 1979, and architecture at the Universidad de Chile, in 1981. His career began in the late 1970s, when he was a part of the Chilean avant-garde in the neo-Conceptual movement.
Jaar mainly uses photography as his support, and his themes revolve around social, political, and geographical crises. A distinguishing feature of his style is the use of light boxes to hold the images: in that way, the photographs are lighted "from inside", as is the case with the Brazilian mines that are the subject of Gold in the morning, his entry for the Venice Biennale in 1986.
Equally celebrated are Jaar's public-space interventions, which are now more than 60 in cities around the world. Among them is his recent The Geometry of Conscience, for the opening of the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago de Chile, and Park of the Laments, next to the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Alfredo Jaar was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur member in 2000. In 2006 he received the Extremadura Creation Award in Spain. Jaar has participated in the Venice Biennale (1986, 2007, 2009), the São Paulo Biennial (1985, 1987, 2010), and Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002), and has presented important solo exhibitions at the New Museum of Contemporary Art (New York), Whitechapel (London), and the Museum of Contemporary Art. The largest retrospective exhibition of his work was held in 2012 in three institutions: Berlinische Galerie, Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst e.v., and Alte National Galerie. This year, Alfredo Jaar will represent Chile in the 55th Venice Biennale.
More information about the artist and his work: www.alfredojaar.net