Alejandro Obregón was born in Barcelona to a Colombian father and spent his childhood between Europe and the United States. In Máscaras (1952), a masked female character holds a tray with food and a conqueror’s helmet connected to a gas mask. These two objects suggest a symbolic continuity between colonisation in the Americas and the twentieth-century post-war events that were transforming the global geopolitics of this time. Obregón explored abstraction, but his work always remained figurative and made continuous comments about political violence in Colombia. Between 1955 and 1956, he received a Guggenheim national prize, and his work entered the collections of the Organization of American States and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. At the zenith of his international recognition, Máscaras was acquired by the Museo Nacional de Colombia in 1956. The work was placed in the stairwell that separated the fine arts collection from the historical collection, weaving critical connections between them.
This is the first time the work of Alejandro Obregón is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Laura Hakel
