“I don’t wish to be Botero or solely a girl who paints,” Beatriz González mentioned within the early Nineteen Sixties, a press release she would later revisit. It captures the trail cast by the Colombian artist, author, curator, educator and mental—referred to as la maestra—who died in Bogotá on January 9 at age 93.
Born in 1932 in Bucaramanga, the capital of the division of Santander, González typically recounted an early anecdote. When she was ten years previous, when a nun at her college confirmed Beatriz’s drawing of a tangerine to her classmates and declared: “That is an artist.” That early affirmation stayed with González, who briefly studied structure on the Universidad Nacional de Colombia earlier than enrolling on the Universidad de los Andes, the place she studied nice arts.
González got here of age in a turbulent context in Colombia, when different types of expression, akin to abstraction or the distinctive model of her modern Fernando Botero, reigned. “For her, originality and uniqueness have been necessary,” says Natalia Gutiérrez, who, since 2016, has been González’s assistant and adviser. Gutiérrez has curated exhibitions, together with, with Pollyana Quintella, the continuing retrospective of González’s work at São Paulo’s Pinacoteca (till 1 February), which can journey to London’s Barbican Centre, marking her first UK retrospective, and finish at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museet.
Beatriz González, Telón de la móvil y cambiante naturaleza (Backdrop of a Shifting and Shifting Nature), 1978 Assortment of the artist. Photograph: Andrés Pardo
“From the outset, she pursued a distinct type of figuration, breaking conventions about what was anticipated of ladies artists,” Gutiérrez says. Influential figures just like the artwork critic Marta Traba took González underneath their wing.
González was additionally a key determine in Colombia’s museum sector. She was amongst these concerned within the opening of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá (Mambo) in 1963. She held her first solo exhibition there in 1964, presenting her sequence La Encajera (The Lacemaker), impressed by Johannes Vermeer’s portray. The sequence displays her reinterpretation of Western artworks’ reproductions, which she tailored into furnishings, wallpapers and curtains.
“In contrast to Pop artwork impressed by mass tradition, González took canonical artworks as referents, infusing them with domestically sourced kitsch,” says Cuauhtémoc Medina, who co-curated the exhibition Guerra y Paz: una poética del gesto (2023-24) on the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (Muac) in Mexico Metropolis with Gutiérrez. “Her ironic self-description as a provincial painter additionally marked a distinct route from mainstream artwork by approaching a subaltern aesthetic.”
Beatriz González, Los suicidas del Sisga III (The Sisga Suicides III), 1965 Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá. Photograph: Óscar Monsalve
One among González’s best-known works is the sequence Suicidas del Sisga (1965), primarily based on {a photograph} of a younger couple who later died tragically. The work marked a turning level in her observe, as she started utilizing pictures from the native press, depicting them with flat types and a vibrant palette. “The sequence marked a route of expression for Beatriz via appropriation, which made some hyperlink her to Pop artwork, an affiliation she rejected,” Gutiérrez says. “Utilizing this route, she modified her strategy over time, synthesising the native context.”
All through her profession, González performed a vital function in artwork training and museum observe in Colombia. In 1978, she envisioned a faculty for museum guides at Mambo that might remodel artwork pedagogy nationwide. She later reinterpreted the gathering of the Museo Nacional de Colombia and served as its chief curator between 1989 and 2004. She was additionally a pioneering researcher on Colombian caricature and Nineteenth-century Colombian artwork, and a mentor. “Lots of Colombia’s present-day museum professionals have been formed by González in a method or one other,” Medina says.
Beatriz González at work in her studio Courtesy Casas Riegner, Bogotá
All of the whereas, she archived paperwork associated to her observe, artwork historical past and journalism. In 2020, she donated her intensive archive to Banco de la República, specifying that it must be saved in her hometown. Medina describes her as a “public mental determine”, noting how her work captured the nation’s complicated context and, extra importantly, portrayed human experiences and gestures, significantly grief.
That is evident in González’s public artwork challenge Auras anónimas (Nameless Auras, 2007-09) at Bogotá’s Cementerio Central, devoted to the nation’s disappeared. Conceived at a time when the columbarios—areas holding the stays of nameless victims—risked demolition, the work contains hundreds of headstones painted with black silhouettes of figures carrying the deceased. “I wish to captivate the auras of the hundreds of lifeless who could also be floating right here and to supply an area the place those that want can mourn,” González as soon as mentioned of the challenge.
“Beatriz was instrumental in reshaping readings of Colombian modern artwork, foregrounding how native situations articulate broader problems with reminiscence, authority, political imagery and collective mourning,” says Paula Bossa, the director of Casas Riegner in Bogotá, which has represented González since 2012.
Beatriz González, Dolores (Ache), 2000 Photograph: Juan Camilo Segura
“González was a essential drive inside Latin American artwork,” says Tobias Ostrander, co-curator of Beatriz González: A Retrospective(2019), the artist’s first large-scale US retrospective on the Pérez Artwork Museum Miami. “Her trajectory moved from utilizing humour in partaking media photos, towards work criticising political figures concerned in perpetuating violence in Colombia, to empathetic photos paying homage to endurance amid struggling.”
González remained lively till lately, touring to her exhibits whereas sustaining a busy schedule again house. “Beatriz didn’t differentiate her creative observe from her different pursuits,” Gutiérrez says. “Her life was a beneficiant, multifaceted dedication to tradition.”
