Personal Life

Rolf Blomberg was born in 1912 in Stocksund, a district of Danderyd Municipality, Sweden.

In 1934, when he was 22 years old, he made his first trip to South America and visited Ecuador and the Galápagos Islands. This was followed by many trips to South America and Borneo.

Rolf Blomberg has been married three times. In 1940 he married the Swedish Kajsa Abdon. During the Second World War, they travelled to Java, where their son Rolf Staffan Blomberg was born on 19 May 1943. During the Second World War, Rolf worked as a neutral war correspondent in Indonesia.

After the war they separated. After the divorce, Kajsa remarried to a Dutchman and took their son to South Africa. She died there in 1954.  Staffan grew up in the Netherlands with his stepfather and died in 1972. He had two children, Kajsa and Birgit (initiators of Blomberg Gallery).

Rolf returned to Ecuador after the war. In 1948 he married the Ecuadorian Emma Robinson, whom he had met on Java. Emma had a daughter from a previous marriage, Chiquita. Together they had two children, Anders and Marcela. Emma died prematurely in Stockholm in 1952, shortly after the birth of their second child. 

Finally, in 1955, he married for the third time to the Guayaquil painter Araceli Gilbert, with whom he settled in Quito in 1968. He stayed with her until his death. Rolf Blomberg died in Quito on December 8, 1996.

Araceli's abstract artworks and Rolf Blomberg's archive are managed from Ecuador, Archivo Blomberg, by Marcela Blomberg.