Colombian artist Beatriz González, known for paintings that exposed the traumatic impact of politics on everyday life, died on January 9th at her home in Bogotá, at 93. Galerie Peter Kilchmann, her Zurich-based representative, announced her death.
González made a career by repainting press photographs of Colombia’s presidents, massacres, and public mourning in a visual language borrowed from cheap prints and domestic décor. Her work treated press images as familiar objects. She replicated them, often in a purposefully garish style—revealing how a society learns to live with the spectacle of its own violence.
London’s Barbican Centre is about to mount the artist’s first U.K. retrospective from February 25th to May 10th, featuring more than 150 works by the artist. Her first U.S. retrospective was mounted by the Perez Art Museum Miami in 2019, and a previous retrospective traveled to the Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Berlin.
“Through her powerful and often vividly colored paintings, she preserved the memory of events and victims that were frequently absent from official histories,” Galerie Peter Kilchmann wrote on Instagram, announcing the artist’s passing.
Born in 1932 in Bucaramanga, Colombia, González came of age during La Violencia, a period of violent political upheaval in her home country during the 1940s and ’50s. She briefly pursued architecture at the National University of Colombia before dropping out. Instead, she enrolled at the University of the Andes to study graphic design—one of just 90 women at the university. She graduated with a bachelor’s in fine arts in 1962.
In the early 1960s and ’70s, González gained fame for her reproductions of masterpieces by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, rendered in a deliberately flattened, off-key style. These subversive works led critics to group her with Pop Art, though González herself rejected the label. Another widely discussed painting, Suicidas del Sisga (1965), depicted a young couple who leapt into the Sisga Dam after believing they could not preserve their purity in life, marking her early turn toward the tragic undercurrents of Colombian society.
“I was always the transgressor; Beatriz González, the controversial artist; I was repeatedly saddled with that adjective,” she told ArtNexus. “I didn’t like the word controversial all that much.”
González’s work took a dramatic turn in 1985, following the M-19 guerrilla attack on the Palace of Justice in Bogotá. The event left 94 people dead and went down in history as one of the most tragic events in contemporary Colombian history. From then on, her work focused almost exclusively on political imagery, depicting mothers weeping following the Las Delicias massacre in 1996, for instance. This macabre tone carried into the 2000s. For instance, for the installation Auras anónimas (2023) González printed silhouettes of workers carrying corpses on more than 8,000 wall niches at the Central Cemetery in Bogotá.
