1938 - 2015
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Nelbia Romero Cabrera was a Uruguayan visual artist. She began her career in drawing and engraving and later incorporated other artistic languages, such as photography, installation, and performance. Her work was marked by themes of politics and protest. She was an active participant in the Montevideo Engraving Club. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994 and was granted the Figari Award in 2006 for her artistic career. Born in the town of Durazno, Uruguay, she was the eldest daughter of a family of rural landowners. Her father, a local political figure, socially active and atheist, shared with his eldest daughter an interest in music and history, passing along his concern for social justice. During the first phase of Romero's career she was mainly engaged in drawing and engraving. Between 1975 and 1980 she participated in "El Dibujazo", a movement in which draftsmen and graphic artists took part in expressing themselves against the social conflict of the period of the dictatorship. At this stage she began to show her work in collective exhibitions, and in 1976 she held her first individual exhibition, received some prizes, and sent works abroad. Romero's work took a new direction in the 1980s with the incorporation of audiovisual language and the use of her body as a plastic element. In turn, her work was increasingly committed to the personal and social consequences of the recent past. She said: “In the 80s I started with other types of searches linked not only to the formal problem, but to other things that mattered to me. Before the dictatorship, it existed as a privilege to elaborate in the artistic field. That privilege stopped being the first thing, and I felt responsible for my work. The dictatorship also gave us to reset and rethink our proposals. The need to arise with the pain I felt began to appear truly – through my face – looking for who I was in that historical moment. The faces appear half covered, half veiled, painting my face, also in black and white. It was something very profound, very meaningful. The way to say ‘here I am’.” During those years of transition Romero made engravings in which photographs of her inked face appear, which she also printed on the works. With these works she participated in collective exhibitions that expressed the new paths taken by the nation's plastic arts towards the end of the dictatorship and during the first years of the return of democracy. In 1983 she presented Sal-si-puedes ("Get out if you can"), considered the first artistic installation made in Uruguay, which included texts, music, body language, plastic art, and atmosphere. The work evokes the Charrúa ethnic group and recalls the Slaughter of the Salsipuedes constituting a reflection on national identity and pluriculturalism in a country that was considered practically without indigenous heritage. Sal-si-puedes is part of the crisis period of the post-dictatorship era in which the perception of a country with European roots, socially homogeneous and of tolerant tradition, was questioned. Romero was nourished by the artistic and academic production (history, sociology, anthropology) that questioned the historical construction of national identity. After the fall of the Uruguayan Dictatorship in 1985, she returned to the country and continued work expressing the pre-Hispanic, indigenous heritage of Urugruay through performance, installations, and multimedia work.
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