Alfredo Jaar: 50 Years Later

Cecilia Brunson Projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar (b.1956), in collaboration with Goodman Gallery. Alfredo Jaar: 50 Years Later marks the time passed since General Augusto Pinochet’s coup over Chilean President Salvador Allende’s democratic government on 11 September 1973. It is against the backdrop of this, one of the harshest military dictatorships in the southern cone, that Jaar produced some of his most poignant work, including his iconic project 'Public Interventions (Studies on Happiness 1979-1981)'. The exhibition includes photographs from this series, depicting signs and billboards in public spaces in Chile, which ask...

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Installation view, 'Alfredo Jaar: 50 Years Later', Cecilia Brunson Projects. Courtesy of Alfredo Jaar. Photography by Eva Herzog.
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Alfredo Jaar, 'Self Portrait', 1977. Archival pigment print mounted on museum board Courtesy of Alfredo Jaar. Photography by Eva Herzog.

Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago, Chile) is an artist, architect and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. He is renowned for his incisive political work which highlights global injustice and engages critically with how the media shapes public perception of political crises. Jaar has explored significant political issues and humanitarian emergencies throughout his career, including th...

Alfredo Jaar (b. 1956, Santiago, Chile) is an artist, architect and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. He is renowned for his incisive political work which highlights global injustice and engages critically with how the media shapes public perception of political crises. Jaar has explored significant political issues and humanitarian emergencies throughout his career, including the Rwandan genocide, the displacement of refugees across borders, and military dictatorships in Latin America. He attributes fundamental importance to the role of culture in these instances, creating art that is direct and explicitly critical, and has realised more than seventy public interventions across the globe.

Jaar’s work has been shown extensively around the world; he participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). Important individual exhibitions include the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (1992); Whitechapel, London (1992); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1994); The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995) and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Rome (2005). Major recent surveys of his work have taken place at Musée des Beaux Arts, Lausanne (2007); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2008); Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlinische Galerie and Neue Gesellschaft fur bildende Kunst, Berlin (2012); Rencontres d’Arles (2013); KIASMA, Helsinki (2014); Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK (2017) and SESC Pompeia, Sao Paulo (2021).

Over sixty monographic publications have been published about his work. He became a Guggenheim Fellow in 1985 and a MacArthur Fellow in 2000. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020.

His work can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and Guggenheim Museum, New York; Art Institute of Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA and LACMA, Los Angeles; MASP, Museu de Arte de São Paulo; TATE, London; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; MAXXI and MACRO, Rome; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlaebeck; Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art and Tokushima Modern Art Museum, Japan; M+, Hong Kong.