Feliza Bursztyn

Feliza Bursztyn (8 September 1933 – 8 January 1982 ) was a Colombian sculptor.

Biography Feliza Bursztyn was born in Bogotá, Colombia, in 1933 to Polish Jewish immigrants. Her parents were visiting Bogotá at the time of her birth in 1933. When they received news of Adolf Hitler's election to the German Chancellorship, they decided to remain in Colombia, where her father founded a small textile factory.

Bursztyn's father managed a prosperous textile factory and the family rose to the elite ranks of industrialists in a nation that underwent a swift process of modernisation. and lastly the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris to study sculptures. At the Academia Grande Chaumière, she was taught by the cubist sculptor Ossip Zadkine. On her second trip to Europe she learned to melt and work scrap metal with the sculptor César Baldaccini.

Bursztyn wasn't as enthusiastic, however, about the country's dynamic transformation because of her observation that the process further deepened the nation's social and economic divisions. In 1960 she converted a section of her father's factory into an art studio. She explored the use of materials and was influenced by the work of the French artist César Baldaccini, and after 1961 she started using scrap metal within her works. Bursztyn was part of a generation that changed the definition of sculpture in Colombian culture.

Bursztyn's workshop in Bogotá was a gathering place for many writers, artists, and intellectuals including Gabriel García Márquez, Alejandro Obregón, Marta Traba, Álvaro Cepeda Samudio, Santiago García, Jorge Gaitán Durán, Fernando Martínez Sanabria, and Hernando Valencia Goelkel. She took exile in Mexico in 1981 due to the political and social problems in Colombia.

Bursztyn married Lawrence Fleischer on 6 December 1952 and together had three daughters, Jannette, Bethina, and Michelle. On 6 December 1982 Michelle gave birth to a daughter and named her Feliza. Bursztyn died in exile in Paris on 8 January 1982, leaving many of her works to the Colombian Ministry of Culture and the National Museum of Colombia. Bursztyn has been one of the artists who have most marked the contemporary art of Colombia and Latin America, but she is little recognized by history. Perhaps, many prefer to ignore her because she devoted herself, both in her artistic career and in her personal life, to breaking the rules.

Bursztyn entered the canon of Colombian art history as a key modern artist, but to place emphasis primarily on her formal innovations as they contributed to the development of modern, autonomous art in Colombia is to risk minimizing the ways in which her work challenged cultural hegemony and European-American discourses of modernity. Her art can be interpreted as problematizing the assumption that "development" is the answer to "underdevelopment," that modernity can be universally beneficial. In their confrontations with dominant power structures in Colombia that sought to control class and gender relations and morality, Bursztyn's work exposed modernity's dark side, coloniality.

Timeline 1960s In 1961, Bursztyn presented her first of eleven chatarras (sculptures made from scraps) in which received negative backlash and a harsh review from even Colombia's leading art critic, Walter Engel.

1970s In the 1970s, two important works—the series Las camas (The beds, 1974) and La baila mecánica (The mechanical dance, 1979) -- fully embraces the possibilities of kinetic art in a multimedia setting. 1973: Designs the offices of Par Publicidad in Medellín commissioned by Luis de Zuleta and Amílcar Osorio.

Unlike other Latin American artists working in abstract art, Bursztyn's pursuit was never focused on rules on how reality should be experienced. On the contrary, she used it as a medium for politicized content relating to women's rights in a post-colonial society, revealing the troublesome face of modernization while putting forth a critique of authoritarian rule.

Chatarras In 1961, Bursztyn unveiled her first eleven chatarras, relatively simple and flat compositions of rustic mechanical fragments such as wheels hoops, nuts, bolts, spark plugs, gears, wires, etc.

Bursztyn's first sculptures (Chatarras – assemblages) were made of junkyard scraps – discarded fragments of machines, tires, cables, bolts and other metal bits. Hers was an undaunted critique of industrialism and ensuing rise of consumerism, and it wasn't welcomed with open arms by the nation's art institutions and critics, who generally believed that artists should be supportive of Colombia's progress. She put the junkyard scraps away in favor of discarded parts from a radiator manufacturing plant. She attached a small electrical motor to the long, spiraling strips of aluminum, which came together as abstract forms set into a noisy, vibrating motion that were experienced by the viewer through several senses at once. 2015 Leon Tovar Gallery at ARCOmadrid 2015 Leon Tovar Gallery. 2016 Galería la Cometa at ARTBO 2016 Galería La Cometa

Collections Feliza Bursztyn's art work has been collected privately and also by public institutions, such as the Museo de arte Moderno, Museo Nacional de Colombia, and Banco de la Republica, all in Bogotá, and Tate Modern London.

Honors and awards 1965: First prize for Sculptures, XVII National Salon. 1965: Win the First Prize in sculpture at the XVII Colombian Artists Salon with the sculpture "Mirando al Norte" 1967: Third prize at the XIX Salon of National Artists.