Salcedo has described the principal themes of her work as 'the idea of silence, the idea of displacement, the idea of absence, of course violence, war, but… shown in the quietest way possible… without actually much happening on the surface.' The artist carries out extensive research into the lives of those affected by the civil war in her native country, Colombia. She interviews the relatives of the dead and the 'disappeared', or comes to know them through the records of humanitarian workers. Her works, often consisting of pieces of discarded domestic furniture made from wood or metal, do not depict bodies of victims, weapons or instruments of abuse; rather they stand as metaphors for violence and suffering.
Untitled 1998 is part of a psychologically fraught group of sculptures made from household furniture.  Here a wardrobe has been filled with cement and a chair literally entombed within it. Rather than being an empty receptacle for someone’s belonging Salcedo’s wardrobe is hermetically sealed and inaccessible, an immutable slab confronting the viewer. Discussing the unsettling dislocation of everyday objects in her work Salcedo has commented: ‘It is always the idea of something that is common, that we all recognise, turned into something that has undergone a process that is obviously violent…’.

Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia, where she lives and works.