Background
Romberg, Osvaldo was born in 1938 in Buenos Aires.
Romberg, Osvaldo was born in 1938 in Buenos Aires.
Student, Colegio National Buenos Aires, 1955. Student, University Buenos Aires, 1962.
He subsequently taught art at the Universities of Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Puerto Rico and Tucuman until 1973, when he emigrated to Israel, teaching at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design for 20 years. In 1993, he began teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His paintings, books, installations, films, and architectural watercolors have been exhibited internationally.
He is currently Senior Curator at Slought Foundation.
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. Paradigma
Beginning in 1980, Romberg drew from the writing of analytic philosopher Thomas Kuhn 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.
He later extended this practice to the deconstruction of color in the art historical canon.