The Colombian sculptor Feliza Bursztyn was born in Bogotá in 1933 to Polish Jewish immigrants.
Bursztyn made sculptures using consumer society’s castoffs, industrial waste, and other materials considered to be junk. Some of the sculptures moved, while others were parts of elaborately staged tableaux and multimedia environments. Bursztyn’s proximity to the manufacturing realm and the ready availability of industrial materials were closely linked to her family’s history. In Bogotá, her father ran a textile factory, which enabled her to study abroad, first at the Art Students League in New York and later at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris, where she studied with Ossip Zadkine. Zadkine introduced her to César (Cesar Baldaccini), who taught Bursztyn how to weld. Inspired by César and the Nouveau réalistes (the New Realists), who built upon the legacy of the readymade by integrating natural objects into their works, Bursztyn began to incorporate unconventional materials in her sculptures.
Burstzyn was an active and visible member of the Colombian avant-garde and intelligentsia. Her studio, located in the textile manufacturing zone and remodeled by architects Rogelio Salmona and Carlos Valencia, was a frequent gathering place for figures such as critic and curator Marta Traba, writer Gabriel García Márquez, and sculptor Alejandro Obregón. Although Bursztyn’s work was not explicitly political, she was critical of the developmental ethos embraced by Latin American elites and instead publicly expressed solidarity with leftist movements and the working class, declaring herself a “worker and a welder”3 while also projecting a glamorous and comedic persona in the media.
She was an outspoken supporter of the Cuban Revolution, and her visits to the island aroused the suspicions of the Colombian government, which had recently introduced a statute that enabled the military to detain Bursztyn in her home, where she was interrogated and tortured. She went into exile, first in Mexico and then in Paris, where she died of a heart attack in 1982. In the face of political persecution, Bursztyn embodied a critical, oppositional practice that foregrounded the power of the feminine and the erotic.
