Osvaldo Romberg | Remembering Osvaldo

Osvaldo Romberg (1938-2019)
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina
Lived and Worked in New York, Philadelphia, Tel-Aviv

Zemack Contemporary Art had the distinct pleasure of working with Osvaldo Romberg, who recently passed away, both during his days at PAFA and when he relocated back to Tel Aviv in 2010.
The current exhibition remembers Romberg with paintings from the last two decade.  The art community will sorely miss his enthusiastic energy and force in the art scene of Tel Aviv and around the world.

Romberg studied architecture at the University of Buenos Aires between 1956 and 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.

Over the past five decades and on five continents, Romberg has produced a consistently goading body of work that tackles questions of analysis, interpretation and representation of art and art history.

In the early 1970s, as a painter and conceptual artist, he began using a grid to analyze the tone and saturation of various colors. Romberg’s deconstruction of both individual hues and those of famous historical paintings investigate the political and social conventions of looking and seeing. The works on paper from this period are infused with Romberg’s interest in art history, philosophy, linguistics, and informational systems.

Romberg was also a full time professor at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, where he a founded a center for experimental cinema, video and media art. He has exhibited widely as an artist at institutions including the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; Kunstmuseum, Bonn; Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Sudo Museum, Tokyo; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Jewish Museum, New York; the XLI Venice Biennial, Israel Pavilion; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, Buenos Aires; and the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.