20th century. Colombian

Born in Spain to a Colombian father and a Catalan mother, at the age of six the family moved to Barranquilla in Colombia. Obregón studied in the UK, the USA, Spain and France. Though he never stopped travelling throughout Europe and the USA, for the most part he lived in Colombia, between Barranquilla, Bogota and Cartagena de Indias.

A self-taught artist, Obregón rejected academic studies, being written off as inept by some academies and expelled from others. However, after taking part in the 5th Salón Nacional de Artistas de Colombia in 1944 he attracted a lot of critical attention. He went on to become a teacher and then director of the School of Fine Arts of Bogota, a post he maintained until 1949, when he resigned following the political upheaval in the wake of the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the leader of the Liberal Party. He moved to Barraquilla, where he painted the underlying violence that seemed to follow him throughout his whole career, and then to Paris, where he would remain until 1955.

His output is to be found in an intermediary point between figuration and abstraction, grounded in nature and Colombian culture, and charged with a strong social and political critique.

As early as 1947, he had a retrospective show with 62 works at the Sala Gregorio Vásquez in the National Library in Bogota. In 1956, he joined the Grupo de la Cueva in Barranquilla, with whom he started to paint murals. From this point onwards his rise was meteoric and his work was acquired by the MoMA and the Pan-American Union in Washington, among other institutions.

Obregón won many awards and distinctions, most notably the first prize at the Bienal Hispanoamericana in Madrid in 1958. From among his countless exhibitions, a special mention is deserved for various retrospective shows of his work: at the Center for Inter-American Relations in New York in 1970, at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá in 1991; and at the El Museo gallery in 1992, the year he died, in which his work was shown alongside some of the great Latin American painters.

In the early 1990s, the brain tumour that would eventually cause his death made him irreversibly blind, and further exasperated his tormented state of mind until his death in Cartagena de Indias. He was buried in Barranquilla, the city that was his lifelong muse.