Osvaldo Romberg

Osvaldo Romberg was born in 1938 in Buenos Aires

Romberg was born in Buenos Aires in 1938 to a Jewish Zionist family of immigrants. As a youth he belonged to youth movements such as Hashomer Hatzair. He attended the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires and graduated in 1955.

In the late 1950s he served in the IDF's Nahal and trained in agriculture at Kfar Szold. Back in Argentina, he studied architecture at the University of Buenos Aires from 1956 to 1962. He then taught painting and color theory at universities in Argentina and Latin America.

In 1969 he came to Israel as a reporter for Argentine weeklies. In 1973 he fled the Dirty War and settled in Israel with his family, teaching at Bezalel until 1992. He headed its art department from 1979 to 1983.

His series include color classifications, begun in 1973, and Paradigma, begun in 1980. From 1986 he built full-scale floor plans of historic buildings, and in 1997 he started Theater of Transparency, a film series. His work was shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Negev Museum of Art.

From 1994 to 2012 he taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He founded the White Box Gallery in New York and the Slought Foundation in Philadelphia, where he was senior curator. In 2012 he founded HaBe'er, an art and film center in Beersheba. He died in November 2019.