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Alejandro Obregon(1920-1992)Born in Barcelona, Spain in 1920, the son of a Colombian father and a Catalan mother, Alejandro Obregon was a painter, muralist, sculptor and engraver. He spent most of his childhood in Barranquilla, Colombia, and in Liverpool, England. In 1939, he studied fine arts in Boston for a year and then traveled to Barcelona, where he would serve as Vice Consul of Colombia for the next four years, and where he spent some time at the famous Llotja, from which he was expelled soon after due to a polemic in which he defended American art. In 1948, he was named director of the School of Fine Arts in Santa Fe de Bogota. Among his students were Enrique Grau, Lucy and Hernando Tejada and Julio Abril. Obregon’s career as director lasted barely a year, but the seeds of change that he planted took rapid root. In 1949, he moved to Paris, during which time he exhibited his work throughout France, Germany and Switzerland. He then moved 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 fully developed, and exhibits the formal elements that came to characterize his work. In 1955, Obregon returned to Colombia and settled in Barranquilla, the land of his father, where he founded La Cueva with a group of intellectuals that included German Vargas Castillo. In 1956, his work Dead Student (also known as The Wake), an allusion to the excesses of the dictatorship, won him the Guggenheim Prize for Colombia. That same year his Cattle Drowning in the Magdalena River was awarded the first prize at the Gulf Caribbean Competition in Houston, Texas. In the 1960’s, thanks to a pictographic system of his own invention, Obregon was awarded the Fancisco Matarazzo Sobrinho Grand Prize for Latin America at the Ninth Sao Paulo Biennial, where he represented Colombia in a pavilion of his own. His works are included in the collections of the Museo Nacional de Bogota, the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogota, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museo de Arte Moderno in Madrid, and the Museo Nacional de La Paz, among others. Alejandro Obegon died in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia in 1992. Further Reading:
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