Feliza Bursztyn

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.

In her Mechanical Ballet, 1979, Bursztyn used linen, steel, motors and wheels to create a stage and arranged seven abstract figures upon it, which hung from the ceiling and performed an awkward, uncoordinated mechanical dance.

In Las camas, 1974, she took 13 beds and in each of them she placed an enigmatic form covered in multi-coloured fabrics, along with an electric motor that set the entire piece in a vibrating motion. In the Mechanical Dance, several characters coexisted completing themselves, providing depth and even from different points of view. However, a degree of sadness and bad omen prevailed in space. If we take into account the events that led to Bursztyn's exile, each character under the Baila fabrics was a hint of what would happen during those years with many Colombians blindfolded and interrogated, subjected to an absurd and endless mechanism. From this perspective, the exhibition space was social and political: the victims were on a platform to be observed by the public with attention and indifference.

The hysterics , made of scrap stainless steel, were exhibited in 1968 at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá, which in those years was based at the National University. With that work, she won that year's XIX National Salon of Artists. In 1969, the series paired with the film Hoy Felisa by experimental director Luis Ernesto Arocha, which, in turn, featured the mobile forms of Las histéricas woven through with the images of pop culture idols like Bette Davis and Marlon Brando.

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 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 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.

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

Feliza Bursztyn was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1933 to Polish Jewish immigrants. Her parents had just been 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.