Alfredo Jaar
Alfredo Jaar, The 11th Hiroshima Art Prize. Courtesy Hiroshima MOCA and the artist, New York.
Galerie Lelong & Co., New York is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Alfredo Jaar opening July 22, 2023 at Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan. The exhibition is held in conjunction with Jaar's receipt of the 11th Hiroshima Art Prize.
Established in 1989 by the City of Hiroshima, site of the first atomic bombing in human history, the Hiroshima Art Prize aims to appeal to a wider world about the “Spirit of Hiroshima,” which seeks everlasting world peace through contemporary art. The prize is awarded every three years. Jaar joins a series of distinguished recipients, including Cai Guo Qiang, Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, Mona Hatoum, Daniel Libeskind, Issey Miyake, Shirin Neshat, Yoko Ono, Robert Rauschenberg, Doris Salcedo, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.
This exhibition, Jaar’s first full-fledged museum exhibition ever held in Japan, functions as a career-spanning survey which includes some of the most important works created by the artist, including a selection of three major installations shown together for the first time, as well as newly commissioned works that approach Hiroshima as a contemporary issue. Works on view will include two new neons—one in English and one in Japanese—that read "Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness," the title of a novella by the late Japanese writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Kenzaburō Ōe. While this phrase recurs throughout Jaar's practice, this marks the first time the phrase appears in Japanese in one of Jaar's works.
After studying architecture and filmmaking, Jaar (born in 1956 in Santiago, Chile) moved to the U.S. in 1982, establishing a base in New York. In the early ’80s, Jaar gained international recognition for his artworks, which included photographs, lightboxes, and public projects. Since that time, Jaar has consistently adopted a journalistic perspective based on thorough investigations of historical events and tragedies, and social inequalities around the world. His work is distinguished by large scale, multisensorial installations which incorporate architecture, photography, film and special effects.
In 1995, the artist created a work related to Hiroshima for After Hiroshima: Special Exhibition for the 50th Anniversary of the Hiroshima A-bombing, which was held at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2013, he also created works based on his research of the Great East Japan Earthquake and the subsequent nuclear power plant accident in Fukushima.