OBREGON Roberto

BIBLIOGRAPHY ARTWORKS

Born in 1946 in Barranquilla (Colombia), Roberto Obregón lived in Venezuela from 1952 until his death in 2003. He began to work influenced by Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, building a hermetic universe full of symbols that act as metaphors. Although he began his career as a figurative painter, in the early seventies he gravitated toward Conceptual art, focusing on the motif of a rose, which he pursued for decades. Based on observational exercises, he talked about the ‘dissections’ of its petals, which he documented, preserved and reproduced in graphic patterns and illustrations of great subtlety.

Obregón constructed a kind of conceptual herbarium with a symbolic and biographical meaning through which he addresses issues related to death, suicide and corporal degradation.

His first solo exhibition was in 1964, following which he participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 1997 he represented Venezuela at the Venice Biennale, in 1998 he participated in the Istanbul Biennial and in 2013 a full retrospective of his work was included in the São Paulo Biennial.