Uruguayan artificial intelligence restores color to lost works by Joaquín Torres García

In a joint effort between the Torres García Museum and the University of the Republic, Uruguayan engineer Rosana García is leading a project that combines science, technology, and art to restore the colors of lost works by Joaquín Torres García using artificial intelligence, according to an article published in the weekly magazine Búsqueda entitled “Color restoration of Joaquín Torres García’s works using artificial intelligence.”

The project stems from one of the most significant losses to Uruguayan art heritage: the fire at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro in 1978, which destroyed more than 70 of the artist’s pieces—including the murals he created for the Saint Bois Hospital—along with works by Picasso, Dalí, and Miró. Decades later, technology offers a new way to revive the original colors of these works.

The starting point was a black-and-white film of a Torres García retrospective made in 1974 by the former Institute of Cinematography of the University of the Republic. Although the audio could be restored, the color had been lost. Using these images, professors Gregory Randall and Lara Raad of the Faculty of Engineering began working on deep learning models capable of recovering the original tones.

Under their tutelage, Rosana García developed her master’s thesis on the chromatic restoration of art images. To do this, she trained artificial intelligence models with millions of pictorial images, seeking to recreate Torres García’s palette as faithfully as possible.

Science, heritage, and collaboration

The interdisciplinary team—including anthropologist Carlos Serra and museum director Alejandro Díaz—combined engineering, art, and conservation knowledge. Reconstruction is part of a line of research that has allowed the museum to recreate the mural “Pax in lucem,” destroyed in the 1978 fire, and develop immersive experiences with augmented reality to visualize the lost works.

Now, the Torres García Museum is preparing a book and an interactive application that will include the results of the colorization process and allow the public to experiment with artificial intelligence models.

García presented the progress of his research at Ingeniería deMuestra, the Faculty of Engineering’s annual science outreach event, on October 10 and 11. Visitors could try out the application she uses to restore color to the master’s works.

Source: “Chromatic restoration with artificial intelligence of works by Joaquín Torres García”, by Silvana Tanzi, published in Búsqueda, October 2025.