Osvaldo Romberg (28 May 1938 – 26 November 2019) was an

Argentine Argentines (mistakenly translated Argentineans in the past; in Spanish (masculine) or (feminine)) are people identified with the country of Argentina. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Argentines, s ...

artist, curator, and professor. He lived and worked in Israel, Philadelphia, New York, and Isla Grande, Brazil.

Life and career

Romberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1938. His parents were Jewish immigrants who emigrated to

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

. He attended high school at the

Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires (''National School of Buenos Aires'') is a public high school in Buenos Aires, Argentina, affiliated to the University of Buenos Aires. In the tradition of the European ''gymnasium'' it provides a free education ...

. After graduating in 1955, he studied architecture at the

University of Buenos Aires The University of Buenos Aires ( es, Universidad de Buenos Aires, UBA) is a public university, public research university in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Established in 1821, it is the premier institution of higher learning in the country and one o ...

between 1956 and 1962. He taught Painting and Color Theory at different universities in Argentina and Latin America until he was forced to flee the Argentine Dirty War, in 1973. He then settled in Israel, where he taught at the

Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design ( he, בצלאל, אקדמיה לאמנות ועיצוב) is a public college of design and art located in Jerusalem. Established in 1906 by Jewish painter and sculptor Boris Schatz, Bezalel is Israel's oldes ...

for 20 years. In 1993, he began teaching at the

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) is a museum and private art school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.Slought Foundation.

Selected Series of Work

Color Classifications

In 1973, Romberg began a didactic investigation of color classification by annotating marks of color, arranged them in grids on paper or canvas. He later extended this practice to the deconstruction of color in the art historical canon.

''Paradigma''

Beginning in 1980, Romberg drew from the writing of analytic philosopher

Thomas Kuhn Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American philosopher of science whose 1962 book ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term '' paradigm ...

to initiate this series by compressing multiple paradigms of Western painting – often abstraction and representation - onto a single canvas.

''Translocations'', ''Building Footprints'', and ''On Scale''

Starting in 1986, Romberg began reconstructing at full scale the floor plans of historical, and often religious, architectural structures. Made from bricks that are in some cases fashioned from books or newspapers, these “footprints” are built either inside the exhibition space or partially outside, yet intersecting with the space.

''Theater of Transparency''

This is a series of filmic work started in 1997, drawing from the history of sex, modernity, and art history. The protagonists are a life-size troupe of transparent marionettes, whose bodies are projection surfaces for the changing historical and metaphorical images that compose their constantly fluctuating identities. Theater of Transparency at ZKM
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Notes

External links

Osvaldo Romberg website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Romberg, Osvaldo Argentine artists Artists from Buenos Aires University of Buenos Aires alumni 1938 births 2019 deaths Argentine Jews Argentine emigrants to Israel Argentine people of Russian-Jewish descent Argentine curators