Feliza Bursztyn

b. 1933, Bogotá, Colombia; d. 1982, Paris, France

[Bursztyn’s] work draws upon the irony that such durable material as metal makes up objects that so quickly become obsolete. Pieces of junk metal…mutely bear witness to the precariousness of the instruments of progress. The precarious quality of development was relevant in Colombia where, as elsewhere in Latin America during this period, industrial development was uneven, incomplete, and benefited the wealthy more than the poor.

—Gina McDaniel Tarver on Bursztyn[i]

Feliza Bursztyn was born in Bogotá, Colombia, to Jewish immigrants from Poland who found within the city safe harbor in the midst of Hitler’s ascension to power.[1] She attended the Art Students League in New York City in 1954, and would later study under the sculptor Ossip Zadkine in Paris. It was during her stay in the French capital, however, that she met the sculptor César, whose reuse of destroyed cars as material for his sculptures would be of fundamental importance for the young Bursztyn.[2] Upon returning to Bogotá in 1960, she turned to the assemblage technique of her mentor as a solution to her lack of funds for proper art materials. While plaster and bronze were out her price range, junk was not.[3] The sculptures that comprised her debut exhibition in 1961 constituted the earliest in her series of “Chatarras,” the Spanish for “Scraps,” which she continued producing even as they were the object of ridicule from Colombia’s foremost critic, Walter Engel.[4] At a time when her compatriots Edgar Negret and Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar were producing sculptures often inspired by the technological marvels of New York City and space flight, Bursztyn scavenged for the abject cast-offs of modern ambition.[5] In Bursztyn’s hands, detritus from the scrap heap spoke from a position of marginality, throwing into sharp relief the reality of Colombia’s process of modernization, and, considering the often feminine titles of her individual Chatarras, established conventions of gender and labor.[6]

By the mid-1960s, Bursztyn started to establish herself as an important figure in Colombian art, despite her unconventional use of materials and techniques. In 1964, she received the first prize for sculpture at the Salón Intercol de Artistas Jóvenes and opened a solo exhibition of her Chatarras at the Museum of Modern Art, Bogotá, then under the directorship of Marta Traba.[7] It was through Traba’s support of Bursztyn and a select group of her contemporaries that Colombia began to develop an artistic culture that moved beyond traditionally accepted mediums (painting and sculpture) and challenged ingrained aesthetic assumptions. A bourgeoning conceptualism was taking hold, and Traba framed Bursztyn and those around her as deeply in dialogue with an avant-garde and progressive international aesthetic.[8] Bursztyn, for her part, pursued an ever more theatrical, environmental route in her work.

In the late 1960s, Bursztyn created what were among the first examples of kinetic art in Colombia: the “Histéricas” series. Primarily composed of curled metal sheets, these sculptures are often set in motion with the assistance of turntable motors. What results is an ungainly kineticism, stuttering and awkward movements that make a mockery of mechanical efficiency. The sculptures shriek or rattle out a clanging staccato as their components crash into one another. The very title of the series itself conjures an ironic play upon the idea of the so-called “hysterical woman,” a “diagnosis” with a long history in the West that pathologized female sexuality and assisted its repression. Such stinging social and political commentary would likewise characterize Bursztyn’s later, intimately scaled “Minimáquinas,” and her notorious “Camas”—vibrating beds covered in sumptuous fabric.

Bursztyn began producing her Minimáquinas in the late 1960s, and exhibited them for the first time in the fall of 1969. They introduce into Bursztyn’s visual language a sense of viewer engagement and play—in the eyes of Bursztyn scholar Gina McDaniel Tarver, they appear as strangely animated creatures.[9] Indeed, the Minimáquina of 1970 exhibits an anthropomorphic quality with a round piece of machinery standing in as the possible head of now-reanimated machine, the bits of thread projecting at all angles appearing like frazzled hair standing on end. Describing this series, Tarver writes: “Since before launching the chatarras in 1961, Bursztyn had not worked on such an intimate scale, and the scale and precious appearance of the Minimáquinas magnetically draws in the viewer, as to a treasure to be examined and appreciated quietly, up close, perhaps in solitude and certainly on an individual basis.”[10] And yet, despite this smaller-scale, Tarver argues that these pieces are no less challenging to “hegemonic culture” than other examples within her radical oeuvre.[11] Bursztyn’s commitment to these challenges, however, would also place her in a position of extreme vulnerability.

Due in part to her leftist politics and the suspicion this engendered among those in power, Bursztyn was blindfolded and briefly detained by Colombian government agents in July of 1981. She was taken into custody for not having the proper documentation for her pistol—though it was not usable—and for an alleged affiliation with the Cuban government. After her interrogation, Bursztyn was released and sought asylum in the Mexican embassy before moving to Mexico City with the hope of continuing on to the United States. When this proved unsuccessful, she moved to Paris and died shortly thereafter of heart failure in the company of celebrated Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Márquez.[12] Her artistic career cut short, Bursztyn’s work is now becoming increasingly visible in modern art history, as evident in her inclusion in Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, organized by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California, traveling to the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo.

[i] Gina McDaniel Tarver, “The Art of Feliza Bursztyn: Confronting Cultural Hegemony,” Artelogie (2013). Online. 6.

[1] Ibid., 4.

[2] Ibid., 5.

[3] Manuela Ochoa Ronderos, “The Uninhabited Stages: Stepping into Feliza Bursztyn’s House,” Master’s Thesis (San Francisco Art Institute, 2013), 18.

[4] Gina McDaniel Tarver, “Intrepid Iconoclasts and Ambitious Institutions: Early Colombian Conceptual Art and Its Antecedents, 1961–1975,” PhD. Diss. (University of Texas, Austin, 2008), 60.

[5] Ibid., 60–61.

[6] Ibid., 62–64.

[7] Ibid., 82.

[8] Ibid., 58

[9] McDaniel Tarver, “The Art of Feliza Bursztyn,” 10.

[10] Ibid.

[11] Ibid.

[12] For information on Bursztyn’s interrogation and subsequent flight, see Colin Harding, “Colombia: New Beginning?: Gabriel Garcia Márques and others face brutal government repression,” Index on Censorship 11, no. 4 (1982), 29.

On View

2 east 75th street