Alejandro Obregón was born in 1920 in Barcelona, Spain,
where his family lived for some time. Most of his childhood was spent in
Barranquilla, Colombia and Liverpool, England. In 1939 he studied fine arts
in Boston for a year and then returned to Barcelona to serve as Vice Consul
of Colombia for four years. In 1948 Obregón was named Director of
the School of Fine Arts in Santafé de Bogotá. His career as
director lasted barely a year, but the seeds of change that he planted took
rapid root. He then went to Alba, near Avignon in France, where he remained
until 1955. A painting from that year, Still Life in Yellow, shows
that his personal style was then fully developed, and exhibits the formal
elements that came to characterize his work.
Obregón is above all a painter. His compositions are usually divided
horizontally into two areas of different pictorial value or size, but of
equal visual intensity. Other elements take their place against them. Color
plays a fundamental role in integrating the structures of his ingenious
design, first in geometric forms and then in controlled expressionism.
The Colombian historian Eugenio Barney refers to "periods"
in Obregón's work, characterized by predominant colors. Certainly
his painting shows the influence of Picasso, as well as that of the Englishman
Graham Sutherland, although these are only points of departure. Thanks to
his enormous creativity, which deeply impressed those who knew him, Obregón
achieved a pictographic system of his own invention, marked by his personal
formal and chromatic symbols. In the 1960s this system achieved a level
of excellence difficult to surpass. It was recognized at the Ninth São
Paulo Biennial, where Obregón represented Colombia in a pavilion
of his own and was awarded the Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho Grand Prize
for Latin America.
Over a period of four decades, Obregón incorporated into his painting
a repertory of themes that transcend literary reference and are unmistakably
Colombian in character. From his still lifes of the 1950s to his landscapes
of the sky, the sea and the buildings of Cartagena de Indias, where he worked
during his last years, Obregón's work is multifaceted. He conveys
his feeling for the geography and wildlife of Colombia, his love of family
and his passion for women. His subjects remind the viewer of loyalty, friendship
and memory and ultimately of the wonder of life, however insignificant it
may seem in terms of the cosmos.
Obregón also refers to contemporary events in Colombia, caught,
like other Latin American countries, in the cross fires of the Cold War.
His work Dead Student (also known as The Wake), an allusion
to the excesses of the dictatorship, won him the Guggenheim Prize for Colombia,
awarded in New York in 1956. That same year his Cattle Drowning in the
Magdalena River was awarded first prize at the Gulf Caribbean Competition
in Houston, Texas an exhibition that also included works by Enrique
Grau, Edgar Negret and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar. |
