In three pivotal early paintings by the Colombian artist Beatriz González, a smartly dressed couple pose side by side, clutching a bouquet. The man wears a fedora, the woman a headscarf. While the warm colors evoke a sense of optimism, the series title, “Los suicidas del Sisga” (1965), and the figures’ solemn expressions hint at an underlying darkness. González based the works on a photograph from a newspaper’s crime section that was widely reproduced across the media: The subjects, gardener Antonio Martínez Bonza and domestic worker Tulia Vargas, his girlfriend, jumped into the Sisga reservoir, north of Bogotá, to take their own lives just days after the photograph was taken. Bonza left behind a note that he wished to preserve Vargas’s purity from a sinful world.
Over six decades, González, who died last month aged 93, transformed such everyday images into bold, unsettling compositions. Around 150 of these works—which made her one of Colombia’s most revered artists—are on display in “Beatriz González,” a touring retrospective of the artist’s career currently on view at the Barbican Centre in London until May. “I’ve known about Beatriz since I was a young girl,” said her gallerist, Catalina Casas, director of Bogotá’s Casas Riegner gallery. She noted that González’s work has a “universal language” and said, “When we speak to any artist of any generation in the Colombian art scene, she is always a reference.”
Beatriz González’s style
Most of González’s work comes from preexisting images, which she collected obsessively throughout her life. Yet what drew the artist to certain pictures is not always immediately obvious. Curator Lotte Johnson points out that it wasn’t the couple’s background that moved González to create “Los suicidas del Sisga,” for example, but the degradation of the image itself over time. “As it was replicated and reprinted, it started deteriorating,” she said, explaining that González was “interested in how fast we forget” images in the media. “We flip past them, and we almost become desensitized to them.” González then transformed such photographs into flat, boldly colored paintings using “technical tones like yellow, red, green, blue, orange—this kind of kaleidoscopic palette,” she added.
Natalia Gutiérrez, curatorial advisor for the Barbican show and González’s former assistant, points out that the artist clipped at least five newspaper articles a day for over 60 years. She stored this vast array of images in folders, which Gutiérrez is now sifting through to produce a comprehensive catalogue for public research. Despite the clarity of González’s style, Gutiérrez sees no clear throughline for González’s subject matter beyond a particular affinity for photojournalism. Instead, her work was “based on the impact of the image,” she said. González “wasn't interested in just recreating a scene from the news, but abstracting elements of those images.”
While González did not transform all these images into paintings, her collection evolved into an artwork itself, amounting to an “extraordinary archive of postcards, newspaper clippings, and reproductions of works,” according to Johnson. And while many of her best-known works depict death and political issues, she also reproduced globally recognizable artworks.
Associations with Pop art
In 1963, González began working on a series of paintings based on Johannes Vermeer’s The Lacemaker (1670–71), eventually exhibited in her first solo exhibition at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá in 1964. These reinterpretations became a wider trend in her practice. “She’s grappling with these so-called masters from Western art history and really contending with them with great reverence, but also critique,” Johnson said. “She was taking Veláquez, Vermeer, Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, these artists who are the so-called pantheon of the Western canon, and thinking about what it means when images of these artworks land in Latin America.”
González’s vibrant reinterpretations led the Western art world to regard her as a Pop art icon as her work gained global acclaim. Yet the artist often stressed that she was not positioning herself in dialogue with Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein and was largely unaware of the movement taking place in the U.S. in the ’60s. “She considered herself a provincial artist,” Casas explained. Yet Casas also noted that she never fought too harshly against the position. “When [curator] Jessica Morgan invited her to be a part of “The World Goes Pop” at the Tate Modern, she said, ‘Well, if I have to be Pop, let them say I’m Pop.’”
González’s work took a political turn
Today, the Tate owns at least two González works that use mass-produced furniture as canvas. The artist started exploring this medium around 1970. At that point in her career, she was “moving away from the traditional format of oil on canvas to experiment,” Gutiérrez explained, noting that many of the paintings reflect their supports. The Last Table (1970), for example, is a reinterpretation of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (1495–98) on a faux-wood dining table, and Interior Decoration (1981) is a nearly 66-foot-long section of a silkscreened fabric hanging, often described by the institution as González’s first explicitly political work.
Originally a nearly 640-foot-long curtain (sold by the centimeter in a bid to make her work more accessible), Interior Decoration depicts an image of Colombia’s 25th president, Julio César Turbay. In the original newspaper photograph, the president sings folk songs at an event celebrating a military officer whose new law forced the writer Gabriel García Márquez and others into exile. Johnson explained that Turbay “led a particularly brutal regime,” yet hired journalists to document an “exuberant, frivolous lifestyle.” The piece, which purposefully simplified the figures and distorted the colors, serves as a “searing critique of the political regime and its hypocrisy at the time,” she said.
Before her death, González was intimately involved in her retrospective and was particularly excited for it to show in London. Casas remembers visiting the Barbican with her before heading to the Netherlands, where González spoke about how “she wished she could at some point show there.” For González, “it was like a dream come true,” Casas explained. And while González did not live to see the final installation, Johnson reminded us that, as one of the most influential Colombian artists of her time, her name precedes the exhibition. “This is not a rediscovery of an artist,” she said. “This is someone who has been practicing for decades.”
