Ivan Navarro

Artist Iván Navarro grew up under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. His experiences during the era inform much of Navarro’s socio-politically charged installations and prints as he confronts the trauma and strife that colored the first two and a half decades of his life.

Navarro was born in Santiago, Chile, one year before the 1973 Chilean coup d'état enveloped the country in clouds of instability and violence. His family navigated the turmoil as best they could while Navarro was a child, and he managed to complete a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree at Pontificia Universidad Católica in 1995 — five years after the end of the 17-year-long dictatorship in Chile. It was two years later, in 1997, that Navarro moved to New York City and began to explore through art the depth of the injustices and human rights violations that took place during his formative years.

Navarro uses text and other devices in a lot of his work to examine these concepts which extend beyond Chile’s late 20th political upheaval to encompass a broader spectrum of global issues. This is perhaps no more evident than in his work You Sit, You Die, completed in 2002. In the sculpture, Navarro created his version of an electric chair made from fluorescent light bulbs with names of those executed in the state of Florida written on paper. Navarro created a similar version titled Red and Blue Electric Chair based on 1918’s Red and Blue Chair by Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld.

Navarro represented his home country with his installation, Death Row, at the 2009 Venice Biennale. In a series of 13 colorful doors inspired by American artist Ellsworth Kelly’s Spectrum, the frames create an illusion of light leading to a void. Other light installations have been exhibited at Paul Kasmin Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of Ivan Navarro prints and other art.