Building Footprints Osvaldo Romberg

The central questions in Osvaldo Romberg’s extraordinarily intellectually grounded and interdisciplinary oeuvre are art historical interpretation and narrative, the analysis of overlayered historical and sociological phenomena, and the contemporary means of interpreting the past. The most definitive part of his activity deals with architectural form, as an imprint of civilisation. The artist, who studied architecture between 1956 and 1962, produced his first works specifically addressing the question of historical architecture in the 1980s. He created his series of objects entitled Building Footprints by selecting from the groundplans and forms used in classical and modern architecture. Romberg took the groundplans or details of the buildings and made miniaturised, box-like versions of them out of wood, which he usually painted black and green, and then affixed them to the wall, thereby stripping the architecture of its original characteristics of function and place and endowing it with sculptural values. Through the pieces in the series that are based on twentieth-century references, like the one displayed here, the artist examines the formal, representational and historical questions of modern architecture with a critical eye that shines a light on their contradictions.

Dominika Sodics