Roberto Obregón
Roberto Obregón
Venezuelan, born Colombia, 1946–2003
Birth placeBarranquilla, Colombia
Death placeTarma, Venezuela
BiographyVenezuelan, born in Barranquilla, Colombia in 1946. From 1959 to 1961 he studied art in the Julio Arraga School of Arts in Maracaibo. By the 1960s Obregón gained the art critics attention as a promising figure of the so-called Venezuelan New Figuration. At the beginning of the 1970s he moved to Caracas where he participated in the actions and exhibitions organized at the Sala Mendoza by a group of young conceptual artists. Since then, he became considered as one of the most outstanding artists to be emerged in Venezuela. He died in Caracas in 2003.From the delicate works on paper in which Roberto Obregon dissected and bonded rose petals accordingly to taxonomic and taxidermy procedures, mimicking the principles of scientific thinking and its methodologies, to his poetic watercolors, photographs and collages, the artist "proved" the contingent nature of statistical collections and empirical truths. By choosing the rose as a repeated motif for his investigation Obregon intervened the scientific language so foreign to emotional responses producing an estrangement between the sign and its material presentation and formal organization. The decontextualization of the motif-as the rose does not belong to nature anymore but to a scientific lab or a botanical collection-- destroys its notion of a universal emblem for romanticism and common romantizations. Obregon’s strategy was addressed to contesting the emotionally charged language of advertising and the psychological manipulation of the industry of entertainment.
Person TypePerson
American, born Cuban, 1915–2022
