Alejandro Obregón

Biography

Obregón painted his first condor in 1959, and after that the bird appeared on almost fifty canvases. The coat of arms of Colombia is of course implied, but in his work the bird means more: the power of American nature, freedom, the drive of life.

He was born on 4 June 1920 in Barcelona. His father was Colombian and his mother Catalan; the family owned a textile factory in Barranquilla, where they moved in 1926. His childhood was spent between Barranquilla and Liverpool, and sources divide his school years between Liverpool and Boston. At first he was not thinking of painting: he worked in the family factory, drove oil workers and interpreted for them in the Catatumbo region, then studied again in Boston. By one account he began painting landscapes there in 1936; by another the decision to become an artist came after his return to Barranquilla.

From 1940 to 1944 Obregón lived in Barcelona and served as Colombian vice-consul. According to some sources he assisted at the Llotja academy and gave free classes; according to others he was quickly expelled from it, and went on to teach himself from Goya, Velázquez and Rembrandt. When he returned to Colombia, his work at the Salons of Colombian Artists of 1944 and 1945 was noticed by the press and critics; Walter Engel called his art expressionist-romantic. In 1945 his first solo exhibition was held, at the National Library in Bogotá, and at the Salon of Coastal Artists he won first prize for “Dorso de mujer” (“A Woman’s Torso”). In 1948 he was appointed director of the School of Fine Arts in Bogotá. That same year he witnessed the uprising of 9 April (the Bogotazo) and later painted a picture of it, known as “Masacre” (“Massacre”).

In May 1949 Obregón left for France. For several years he lived at Alba-la-Romaine near Avignon, among other artists, and there his painting became more geometric, with echoes of Cubism. In 1954 he met Picasso. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired “Souvenir of Venice” (1954) in 1955, and he became one of the few Colombians in its collection. In 1955 he returned to Colombia and settled in Cartagena.

Prizes followed. In 1956 he won first prize at the Gulf Caribbean competition in Houston, and the national prize for Colombia at the Guggenheim International Exhibition for “Estudiante muerto” (“Dead Student”). That painting belongs to a group of works about students and leaders who lost their lives in the years of La Violencia. Close to it is “Velorio” (“Wake”), also called “Estudiante fusilado” (“Executed Student”): it refers to the events of 8 and 9 June 1954, when, after student protests at the National University against the dictatorship of Gustavo Rojas Pinilla, troops killed thirteen students. Obregón was one of the first Colombian artists to respond to La Violencia, and, to my mind, the most important thing about “Velorio” is that he gave up anecdote: the figures are reduced to simple forms, and line and colour are deliberately non-naturalistic. In “Violencia” (1962) the body of a woman lying on her back is set into the landscape, grey, with scratches and sparse touches of red; it won the first national prize at the Salon of 1962. In 1957 Obregón made the mosaic “Tierra, mar y aire” (“Earth, Sea and Air”) for a building in Barranquilla, nine by six metres: he glued on the ceramic tiles one by one, and the work took about a year. In 1958 he received an award at the Hispano-American Biennial, and in 1959 he was appointed a teacher at the School of Fine Arts of the National University. Together with Enrique Grau, Fernando Botero, Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar and Edgar Negret, he was counted among the “Big Five” of Colombian art. He was also a friend of the writer Gabriel García Márquez, who belonged to the Barranquilla group.

After 1958 he moved away from geometry towards an expressionist manner. In the 1960s he used a system of signs of his own invention, made of forms and colours; at the Ninth São Paulo Biennial in 1967 he represented Colombia in his own pavilion and won the Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho Grand Prize for Latin America. In 1966 he switched from oil to acrylic and won the national prize for “Ícaro y las avispas” (“Icarus and the Wasps”). In 1967 he became head of the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá.

From 1970 Obregón lived and worked in Cartagena. For the BBVA bank in Barranquilla he made the mural “Cosas de aire” (“Air Things”, 1970); in the 1970s he painted murals for government institutions, for the Vatican and for the United Nations headquarters in New York (1983). In 1975 he made a bronze sculpture, “Soltando la Onda”, seven metres high, for Telecom in Bogotá, and in 1981 designs for 102 pieces of porcelain tableware. He was awarded the Order of San Carlos (1970) and the Cross of Boyacá (1992). In 1991 a retrospective was held at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá.

Obregón died on 11 April 1992 in Cartagena. He was buried in the family mausoleum in the General Cemetery of Barranquilla.