The visual artist and sculptor Doris Salcedo was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1958. At 22, she came to New York City to earn an MFA at New York University, and then she went back to Bogotá. There, amid the country’s political turmoil and violence, members of Salcedo’s family disappeared. Sudden absence became a theme in her art, which uses commonplace items such as furniture, clothing, and glass to explore pain, loss, and morning. “I see myself as a connection,” she said in 2021 at Harvard. “I am simply connecting the thought of philosophers, the writing of poets, the experience of victims. And then I find a material object that can convey all this. My participation as an artist is actually quite humble.” Salcedo’s first major retrospective in Switzerland contains 100 works. —Elena Clavarino