Beatriz González, a Colombian painter who ranks among the many most vital Latin American artists of the twentieth century, died on Friday at her house in Bogotá at 93. Galerie Peter Kilchmann, her Zurich-based consultant, introduced her passing however didn’t specify a trigger.
González’s wide-ranging oeuvre examined painterly taboos and flirted with controversy. Working with a shade palette that was typically termed garish or unpleasing to the attention, she initially gained fame throughout the Nineteen Sixties by remaking artwork historic masterpieces, then pivoted throughout the ’80s, a interval when she started to color explicitly political pictures critiquing her nation’s authorities and acts of violence that made headlines.
Her artwork not often match neatly into predetermined classes. Her work of the ’60s and ’70s, which featured luridly hued remakes of beloved works by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, have generally been referred to as Pop artwork, although she disavowed any relationship with that motion. Her political works from the ’80s onward share affinities with many protest-minded items of the period, however she typically caught along with her chosen medium of portray whereas others opted for set up or sculpture.
“Sure, generally I see myself like a transgressor that didn’t slot in her time,” González stated in an interview with Tate Fashionable, which featured her artwork in its 2015 present “The World Goes Pop,” a survey that has been credited with globalizing the Pop artwork canon.
Beatriz Gonzalez’s Inside Ornament (1981) was proven at Documenta 14.
NurPhoto through Getty Photographs
Although acknowledged broadly properly earlier than that exhibition, González has since ascended to worldwide stardom, showing in Documenta 14 in 2017 and the Museum of Fashionable Artwork’s 2019 rehang. She had retrospectives in each of these years, and he or she died as a 3rd one now makes the rounds. That present will go on view in February on the Barbican Centre in London, having premiered final 12 months on the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; it is going to additionally go to the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo.
Beatriz González was born in 1932 in Bucaramanga, a Colombian metropolis that she later credited with influencing her artwork. “I half shut my eyes and I can see the colours of Bucaramanga, that I noticed in my childhood,” she as soon as stated. “The colours of my work are these of the sunsets I might watch with my father.” Raised throughout a interval of turmoil and civil struggle often known as La Violencia, González developed an curiosity in artwork in highschool, however she selected to not research it in school as a result of she “didn’t need to spend time studying one thing that I assumed I already knew,” as she informed the artist Amalia Pica in a 2017 interview.
A few of Beatriz González’s work had been inset inside items of furnishings. Pictured right here is Ante el duelo (2019), which responds to an image of a girl mourning a killing of an individual by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia.
Picture Philip Fong/AFP through Getty Photographs
As an alternative, she opted to review structure on the Nationwide College of Colombia. However as a result of she solely was made to take one artwork historical past class, she discovered herself disinterested and dropped out. She returned to Bucaramanga, the place she took a variety of jobs: at a tobacco manufacturing facility, as a window show maker, and extra. Then, on the urging of her father, she determined to review artwork extra critically, enrolling within the graphic design program of the College of the Andes in 1957.
Her breakthrough got here within the ’60s, when González produced such works as her “Suicidas del Sisga” work, which are actually thought-about legendary. Painted in 1965, these works had been primarily based on pictures of a younger spiritual couple who threw themselves into the Sisga Dam, fearing that they won’t obtain purity on this life. González’s representations of the couple had been primarily based on pictures that appeared within the press, initiating an curiosity in remaking photos from the media that will stay for her complete profession. Her photos are notably fuzzy across the edges, an allusion to the lack of element that occurred when the couple’s picture was printed in newspapers and magazines.
She then turned her focus to popular culture and started appropriating the compositions of historic artworks for her personal canvases. The place these masterpieces hung in museums, González’s remakes had been generally allowed to infiltrate the world extra broadly. Diez Metros de Renoir (Ten Meters of Renoir, 1977) concerned repainting the Impressionist’s portray Bal du moulin de la Galette at a grand scale—a measurement larger than the unique, notably. She then minimize up her model and offered it to the general public by the centimeter.
Beatriz González’s Los suicidas del Sisga II (1965) belongs to a sequence of work that remade photos of a useless younger couple that appeared within the media.
Picture Óscar Monsalve
Different works from the ’70s had been even stranger. For one sequence, she inset her artwork historic remakes in vanities, mattress frames, and different items of furnishings. Once they confirmed on the Bienal de São Paulo in 1971, curator Marta Traba referred to as them “marginal artwork,” discovering no different apparent technique to clarify them.
“In the beginning I used to be eager to see how a piece rooted in Western artwork historical past could possibly be remodeled, transfigured, as soon as it reached us right here in Colombia,” González stated in 2022. “What occurs when somebody discovers a copy of an art work in a guide?”
Through the ’80s, she started to translate that fascination with picture tradition to present occasions and political upheaval, clipping photos from the media associated to President Julio César Turbay Ayala, who was elected in 1978. She made such works as Inside Ornament (1981), an enormous portray on curtain by which Turbay Ayala could be seen at a celebration amongst many friends. Her composition was cobbled collectively from many alternative pictures within the media and was offered by the meter, suggesting that the president could possibly be commodified and copied with ease. The piece was understood to be important of his administration; González recalled a heightened police presence at a few of her exhibition openings on the time.
The 1985 siege on the Palace of Justice by the leftist group M-19 initiated a “sea change” in her work, she stated, spurring her to drop any sense of irony for a extra critical sensibility. “What struck me most was how justice itself had been killed,” she stated, referring to the handfuls of individuals killed whereas armed troopers sought to quell the M-19 group, which had taken the Supreme Court docket hostage with the goal of holding the conservative President Belisario Betancur accountable for his actions.
Within the following years, she would paint such topics as Yolanda Izquierdo, a human rights advocate, and moms weeping following the Las Delicias bloodbath in 1996.
Beatriz González’s Televisor en shade (1980) options a picture of Julio César Turbay Ayala. The artist stated she as soon as acquired a name from the President’s workplace over this work and others important of him.
Assortment of Susana Steinbruch
In 2007, she even produced Auras anónimas, certainly one of her most bold tasks, which concerned filling greater than 8,000 niches in a Bogotá cemetery with printed silhouettes of employees carrying corpses. “I had labored on tombstones beforehand and thought they could possibly be printed utilizing guide display printing, reproducing pictures of a theme prevalent in nationwide photojournalism: males carrying corpses, victims of the struggle,” she stated. “With these figures, I got down to assemble an emblem that represented what was occurring within the nation.”
González’s impression inside Colombia is widespread, partially as a result of she didn’t solely work as an artist. She additionally was a curator on the Nationwide Museum of Colombia, and for 20 years, she served as an adviser to the Museo de Arte del Banco de la Repúblic, serving to to develop the financial institution’s assortment. She additionally directed the tutorial program of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá.
However it’s her artwork that has confirmed most enduring. When her 2019 retrospective visited Bogotá, Colombian curator Eugenio Viola wrote in his Artforum assessment that González was “one of the vital influential dwelling Colombian artists.”
Regardless of all that fame, and regardless of the boldness of her artwork, González typically described herself as a reserved individual. However, as she informed Amalia Pica, “It’s typical of shy individuals: we’re usually very reserved however, after we do need to say one thing, we go off like a bomb.
