Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

This HESCAH lecture is on the work of Venezuelan artist Roberto Obregón, whose career spanned the decades from the 1960s to his death in 2000 and who is a key figure of global conceptualism. Obregón decided to focus a significant part of his artistic production on one of consumer society’s favorite symbols: the rose. For thirty years he produced hundreds of works related to the rose, but he dismantled its kitsch aesthetic and introduced a pseudo-scientific approach to this millenary symbol. His practice was to accumulate, classify, preserve, and display the rose and to study it like a traditional botanist. The lecture is presented in conjunction with the following exhibitions at the University of Florida: Accumulate, Classify, Preserve, Display: Roberto Obregón Archive from the Carolina and Fernando Eseverri Collection at University Gallery, and Accumulate, Classify, Preserve, Display: Works by Roberto Obregón from the Carolina and Fernando Eseverri Collection at the Harn Museum of Art.

Luis Pérez-Oramas is an independant scholar and Director of Instituto Roesler.  He is a Venezuelan poet, art historian and curator. He is the author of eight poetry books, four recollections of essays, as well as numerous art exhibition catalogues. He has contributed as Op Ed author to national newspapers in Venezuela (El Nacional and El Universal) as well as to various literary and art magazines in Latin America and Europe. He has organized numerous art exhibitions in Venezuela, Brazil, Europe and the US. In 2011 he was appointed Curatorial Director of the XXXth São Paulo Biennial, which he organized under the title The Imminence of Poetics, an edition extremely well received both nationally and internationally. He worked as a curator at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, since 2003 where he held the position of Latin American Art curator between 2006 and 2017, and organized the exhibition Tarsila do Amaral: Inventing Modern Art in Brazil.

Sponsored by Harn Eminent Scholar Chair in Art History (HESCAH), UF International Center, Center for Latin American Studies, Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, and the Florida-Brazil Linkage Institute.

This event is free and open to the public.

For more information, please contact Kaira Cabanas: k.cabanas@ufl.edu