Roberto Obregón Archive

Colección C&FE acquired the Roberto Obregón Archive (ARO) in 2011. The archive has over 3,000 objects, including works of art, documents, and personal effects of various kinds, that were found in Obregón’s residence at the time of his death in 2003.

More specifically it consists of drawings, paintings, sketches, collages, photographs, photocopies made by Obregón, and original works by other artists. The documents comprise sketchbooks, diaries, correspondence, and newspaper clippings. The personal effects include the artist’s tools, collections of travel souvenirs and playing cards, videotapes, records, etc.

Obregón’s library is also a big part of this archive. While art books and catalogs are predominant, there are also publications on the various subjects that interested him such as literature, philosophy, pop culture, botany, etc. Many of these volumes preserve the artist’s markings through underlining, margin annotations, and various marks that help us understand his most specific ideas and thoughts.

The archive, as a whole, is a corpus of essential materials for the study and comprehension of the complex work of Roberto Obregón, one of the most outstanding contemporary Venezuelan artists.

Roberto Obregón was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1946. In 1952 he relocated with his family to Maracaibo, Venezuela. His first individual exhibition was at the Centro de Bellas Artes de Maracaibo (1964). His painting, figurative and heavily influenced by expressionism, will evolve in the coming years to approach the new figuration.

He moved to Caracas in 1966 and the following year, he presented his solo exhibition 20 pinturas (Galería 22). When he participated, in 1968, in the II Salón del Instituto Nacional de Hipódromo, his works were censored. From this moment on he abandoned figurative painting and began the search for a more personal language, while he remained almost totally distanced from the public scene. In the mid-seventies, after becoming acquainted with the work of Eadweard Muybridge, Duane Michals, and Lucas Samaras, he produced his first photographic chronicles of flowers and landscapes. Around this time he also discovered the procedure of botanical dissection.

In 1978 he presented Proyecto desengavetado número tres: El agua como un ciclo (Sala Mendoza), from which his work became very in line with the language of conceptual art. With the solo show Veinte disecciones (Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, 1982), the dissection procedure has already become the axis of his artistic proposal.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, he participated in important group exhibitions in Caracas, such as CCS-10. Arte venezolano actual (National Art Gallery, 1993). In 1994 he obtained the first prize in the IV Biennial of Guayana. He represented Venezuela at the Havana Biennial (1994), the Venice Biennial (1997), and the Istanbul Biennial (1998). In 1999 he had one of his most important solo exhibitions, Niagara, at the Alejandro Otero Museum in Caracas.

He passed away in Tarma, Venezuela, in 2003.