"Art expresses what history cannot." For Beatriz González, this idea was never just a formula, but a true method. As the artist's first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom – and the largest organized in her honor in Europe – now highlights the breadth of her work, her art appears more essential than ever for understanding the power of images.
For more than six decades, Beatriz González (1932-2026) transformed our understanding of the circulation of images between politics, memory, and everyday life. An artist, art historian, curator, and teacher, she, known as "la maestra" in Colombia, constructed an artistic language that was at once direct, unsettling, and profoundly human.
Featuring over 150 works, the exhibition demonstrates how, through his experimentation with multiple media, González constantly challenged the hierarchies of value attributed to specific art forms or cultures. The exhibition encompasses a wide range of practices: from paintings and sculptural objects to interventions on furniture and monumental printed curtains.
From the 1960s onward, the Colombian artist grasped something essential: images do not simply document reality; they shape how that reality is remembered. Newspapers, in particular, fascinated her. For González, press photography was not merely a record of current events; it became a cultural object capable of fixing narratives of power, tragedy, or spectacle in the collective memory.
His iconic series The suicides of Sisga (1965) – three paintings that reinterpret a newspaper photograph depicting the tragic death of a young couple near Bogotá – perfectly illustrates this approach. But González doesn't simply reproduce the image: she transforms it through flat planes of vibrant color and simplified forms, creating a work suspended between satire and elegy. The news item thus becomes a reflection on how tragedies are transformed into representations.
This transformation is central to her practice. González regularly returns to images already ingrained in the collective imagination—political portraits, scenes of national mourning, fragments of art history—which she reinterprets through a recognizable palette of acid greens, yellows, and pinks. While her paintings may seem simple at first glance, almost playful, they carry within them a disturbing ambiguity and the persistent memory of the violence that runs through Colombian history.
From the 1970s onward, her work gradually extended beyond the canvas. The motifs also appeared on furniture, household objects, and decorative surfaces, which became the supports for what she called "interventions." Works such as Kennedy (John Fitzgerald) (1971) – enamel on a metal piece of furniture depicting the assassinated Democratic president – or Interior decoration (1981) – a printed curtain depicting the Colombian president at a party, denouncing the use of spectacle to divert attention from brutality – transforms unexpected media into political memory. The home then becomes a space where public history is silently inscribed.
After 1985, González's artistic tone evolved, shifting from satirical criticism to a practice of bearing witness to violence, as in the work Burial at the National Museum (1991) where she assembles images from diverse sources to compose scenes of surreal, almost mythical brutality. She also uses monumental public installations to evoke the traumas of Colombia, such as her large-scale site-specific intervention. Anonymous Auras (2007-2009) which pays homage to the victims, often anonymous, of the protracted armed conflict in the country. Yet, González rarely depicts violence head-on, favoring repetition, stylization, and color—visual techniques that create distance while simultaneously amplifying the emotional impact of the images.
This exhibition is accompanied by a book published by Prestel, dedicated to this remarkable body of work. Richly illustrated with over 300 reproductions, it situates González's practice within the political and cultural history of Colombia while highlighting its international reach. Essays by Estrella de Diego, Cecilia Fajardo-Hill, Julieta González, Lotte Johnson, Diego Chocano, and Miguel A. López analyze how the artist disrupted visual hierarchies, navigating freely between mass media, popular culture, and art history. Contributions from artists such as Luis Caballero, Amalia Pica, and José Alejandro Restrepo also attest to his enduring influence.
Today, Beatriz González's work appears strikingly relevant. In a world saturated with visuals, from the news to social media, it reminds us that images are never neutral. They accumulate meanings as they circulate, carrying with them traces of power, memory, and history.
What the artist reveals, with remarkable consistency, is that the afterlife of images can sometimes be more powerful than the events they once recorded.
“Beatriz González”
Art Gallery – Barbican Center
Silk Street, London (England)
