Beatriz González, one of Latin America’s most prominent contemporary art figures, died on 9 January at her home in Bogotá, aged 93.
Born in Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 1932, Beatriz González reached adulthood during ‘La Violencia’, a civil war that marked the country from 1948–58. She started making art in the 1960s at the University of Los Andes in Bogotá, where she studied under the critic and writer Marta Traba Taín. Throughout her more than six-decade career, her work encompassed painting, sculptural assemblage, printmaking and installation.
Early on, González started appropriating and questioning images from mass-media, a practice that led her to being considered one of Latin America’s leading Pop artists – though she herself did not associate with the movement. Her well-known series Los suicidas del Sisga (The Sisga Suicides, 1965) for instance, colourfully reimagines black-and-white newspaper photographs of a couple that drowned themselves at the Sisga Dam. She also reinterpreted famous works of European art, reflecting on notions of taste and the art historical canon, for example in Telón de la móvil y cambiante naturaleza (Curtain of the Moving and Shifting Nature, 1978), a version of Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863) reproduced on curtains, and La última mesa (The Last Table, 1970) depicting Da Vinci’s The Last Supper (c. 1495–98).
Though González’s work always engaged with the socio-political fabric of Colombia, it took on more overtly political dimensions from the 1980s onwards, with critical depictions of political figures in works such as Mr. President, What an honor to be with you at this historic moment (1986). ‘It’s been a critique of power that has impregnated my work’, she told ArtReview in 2016. ‘For that same reason, I don’t think of it as “political”; it just has a commitment to ethics.’
González also played a key role in art curation and education. She coordinated the educational program at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá from 1978 to 1983, and served as chief curator of the Museo Nacional de Colombia from 1989 to 2003.
A retrospective of Beatriz González’s work is currently on view at the Pinacoteca de Sao Paulo through 1 February. It will travel to the Barbican, London, from 25 February – 10 May and to Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo from 12 June – 11 October.
