Alberto Marcos Bursztyn

Biography

Alberto Marcos Bursztyn was raised in the wine country at the foot of the Andes in Argentina and came to New York as a teenager; his own account traces a path from the Andes to Far Rockaway, a kibbutz, Brighton Beach and Park Slope. He studied geology and art, then earned a PhD in psychology at Columbia University, and has built a career as an educator, clinician and author alongside his studio work. His art training came largely through Brooklyn College's MFA program, where he worked with sculptor Patricia Cronin, painter Elizabeth Murray and installation artist Juana Valdes, among others.

His practice ranges across sculpture, installation, photography, painting and video, and often starts from things that have outlived their use. He looks for the aesthetic and psychological possibilities in found objects, and his installations take up memory, migration and personal history, sometimes with a light touch of humor. He keeps studios in Brooklyn and Sullivan County.

His work is in the collections of the Brooklyn College Library and the B.U. Kashkin Museum in Yekaterinburg, Russia, and recent installations have appeared at the Plaxall Gallery in Long Island City, on Governors Island, at the Rockland Center for the Arts and at Beacon 3D. He is a member of the Sculptors Guild. For 'Reclamation' he showed 'Stick Stag' (2025), a roughly 12-foot-long figure assembled from milled wood and door frames.

Practice. Sculpture and installation from obsolete and discarded objects, alongside photography, painting and video; themes include memory, migration and the psychological charge of everyday things.