The Pinacoteca de São Paulo is hosting the first leg of a touring retrospective of the Colombian artist Beatriz González, whose paintings often play with images from popular culture. Although relatively little known throughout much of her career, this will be the painter’s third touring retrospective in under a decade. (Her first began in 2017 and toured Bordeaux, Madrid and Berlin, while her second, starting in 2019, took in Miami and Houston.) The series of shows highlight a resurgence of interest in Latin American women artists, particularly those who have lived under oppressive political regimes.
The Pinacoteca’s retrospective will take an “art-historical reading from the perspective of the Global South”, reinforcing a “Latin American viewpoint”, says its co-curator Pollyana Quintella, who organised the exhibition with the Colombian curator Natalia Gutiérrez. The show will feature nearly 100 works from across González’s career, underscoring how her art serves as a “direct confrontation with Colombia’s history of violence, while challenging ideas around good taste, kitsch and popular culture”.
Born in Bucaramanga in 1938, González has had few breakthroughs in wider South America, with this being her first solo presentation in Brazil. She participated in the 11th Bienal de São Paulo in 1971 but received little recognition then, as the biennial was heavily boycotted in protest against Brazil’s military dictatorship. Four decades later, the Pinacoteca exhibited González’s work when it hosted the Hammer Museum’s touring show Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-85. But the full breadth of her practice, and its affinities with Brazilian Pop art movements like Nova Figuração in the 1960s, remained understudied until now.
Never-ending political violence
The show will unfold across seven rooms that delve into different historical and conceptual aspects of González’s practice. Works like Los Papagayos (1987) demonstrate several of the artist’s “core strategies”, according to Gutiérrez, including the use of repetition, bold colour and fragmentation, in addition to political critique. In the work, the profiles of three military officers and the former Colombian president Belisario Betancur are repeated across the panoramic painting, mimicking mechanical printing and alluding to never-ending political violence.
There will be several significant loans in the exhibition that explore religious themes, too—another focus in González’s work—including Los suicidas del Sisga II and Los suicidas del Sisga III (both 1965) from the Museo La Tertulia and the Museo Nacional de Colombia, respectively. González based the series on a photograph of a fanatical religious couple who had reportedly drowned themselves to escape from carnal sin.
The survey will travel to the Barbican Art Gallery in London and the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo next year, with each iteration having a distinct regional focus, while at the same time continuing to emphasise how González’s work remains globally relevant today.
• Beatriz González, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 30 August-1 February 2026; Barbican Art Gallery, London, 25 February-17 May 2026; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, 12 June-11 October 2026
