Osvaldo Romberg

Osvaldo Romberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1938 to Jewish immigrant parents. He studied architecture at the University of Buenos Aires between 1956 and 1962. He taught painting and color theory at universities in Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Tucumán, and Puerto Rico, and participated in experimental art initiatives in Argentina, including the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética Buenos Aires. In 1973, he emigrated to Israel, where he taught for two decades at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and served as chair of its Fine Arts department. After relocating to the United States, he taught at institutions including the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and co-founded the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia.

Romberg examined how art is constructed and understood, using painting, works on paper, books, installation, film, and architectural studies as related forms of inquiry. He analyzed color, form, and representation by separating images into basic components and organizing them into systems. In works such as the Color Classification series, he identified and catalogued the colors used in historical paintings, presenting them independently from the original images. He used similar analytical approaches in architectural projects, working from existing buildings and architectural plans to produce drawings, models, and installations. In the late 1960s, Romberg was a member of the Grupo de Arte y Cibernética Buenos Aires, active from 1969 until 1973, which included artists such as Antonio Berni, Eduardo Mac Entyre, and Miguel Ángel Vidal, alongside engineers and programmers. Working with computing facilities at the ORT School of Technology, the group produced computer-generated drawings using an IBM 1130 system and plotter machines.

His work was shown in solo and group exhibitions at institutions including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, the Negev Museum of Art in Beersheba, and the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, where he became the first living artist to present a solo exhibition in 1980. He took part in international biennials and survey exhibitions, and his work is held in public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Over the course of his career, he received major awards, including Argentina’s Gran Premio Nacional, as well as later recognition in Israel for his contribution to contemporary art. Romberg passed away in 2019.