Beatriz González (1932 to 2026) was born and worked in Colombia, South America, where she became a major artistic force. She is known for transforming images people encounter every day – newspaper and magazine photos and imagery on everyday products – into big brightly coloured and ‘naive’ or simply designed paintings.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing two works from her early mothers-and-children series (photo by the author)
Now the Barbican is hosting the first major UK retrospective of her work. It is big and bold, with over 150 works in a range of media – not only paintings and drawings, but wallpapers, an extensive selection of her ‘furniture works’, fabric curtains printed with her trademark images, and immense hangings. It’s physically dramatic and exciting to walk around.
González was an outsider three times over: as a woman 1) in a traditionally male society and 2) in a male-dominated art world. But the really important outsiderness was 3) being outside the European and American artistic mainstream. The last 50 years have seen enormous change in this respect, with artists from outside Europe and America finding their voices and places and becoming more fashionable.
Back when she started out, though, there was a strong sense of being far from the metropolitan centres of art, in Paris or New York. This anxiety or self consciousness explains why her earliest works take classics of the European tradition and transform them into the ‘naive’, blocky highly coloured style she developed almost from the start of her career. Hence images by Vermeer, Velázquez and other Old Masters given the colour block treatment. It’s a way of reimagining and to some extent repossessing the Old Master tradition which she continued throughout her career and which is most dramatically embodied in the enormous, double-wall height hanging showing her version of Manet’s famous Dejeuner sur L’Herbe, all 12 metres of it, dominating the downstairs gallery and titled ‘Telón De La Móvil Y Cambiante Naturaleza’ (Backdrop of a Mobile and Changing Nature) from 1978. It’s really very big.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing her enormous remaking of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe as ‘Backdrop of a Mobile and Changing Nature’ (1978) (photo by the author)
So Latin Americanising the classics was one, early, strand. Alongside this González developed a fascination with newspaper and magazine photos. There are rooms and rooms of these. The wall labels go into detail about this or that news story but it’s obvious that certain particular images stood out from the daily blizzard of news photos, for some reason struck enough of a chord with her to justify devoting days and weeks to making big painted versions of them.
Los suicidas del Sisga (The Sisga Suicides) (1965) is one such. It reinterprets a newspaper photograph of a tragic story of a double suicide. Three vivid paintings – rarely displayed together but reunited here in a dedicated gallery – translate the original black and white newspaper photo into flat planes of saturated colour.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing ‘The Sisga Suicides’ (photo by the author)
Highly coloured, stylised reversioning of images found in the popular media: all this is highly reminiscent of the Pop Art movement, widespread in Europe and America in the 1960s, which turned its back on High Art and rejoiced in the ephemera of everyday life, as in the work of Andy Warhol, Richard Hamilton or Peter Blake. The exhibition includes four or five display cases showing the wide range of newspapers, magazines, postcard and other sources which González kept in her huge archive.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing one of the half dozen display cases containing the newspaper or magazine photos she used as the basis of her highly stylised images (photo by the author)
Except that González never used photos or collage as the First World Popsters did. Instead everything is heavily focused on her blocky, high coloured imagining of the human figure. Human beings are central.
This all has lots of fun, poppy aspects. In 1968 a friend sent her a postcard from London with a picture of the Queen on it and this prompted González to find other images of the British Royal Family and redo them in her trademark style.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing images of the British Queen Elizabeth II from 1968 (photo by the author)
It’s also related to the ‘furniture works’ she developed in the 1970s, where she took everyday pieces of furniture – beds, cupboards, jewellery boxes, dressing tables, old-style televisions, wardrobes – and painted on to them jokey González-style figures. Some of them are classic icons of the time, such as US presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Others reimagined images of Jesus and Bible scenes such as the Last Supper redone in her trademark blocky dayglo style. And continuing her theme of reimagining / repossessing the classics, there’s a wardrobe with a primitive copy of the Mona Lisa painted onto it.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing examples of her furniture paintings – a tea tray, a fake TV, a basket, a jewellery box, all painted with simplified images, and on the right a blocky copy of the Mona Lisa painted over a dresser mirror (photo by the author)
In the early 1980s the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia or FARC, founded back in the 1960s and deriving from groups of peasants fighting against violence and exploitation, had become large enough and well armed enough to start a military campaign against the state security services and army which developed into a kind of civil war.
As a result, during the 1980s life in Colombia became more violent and perilous. Some of the newspaper images she painted in the 1970s concerned murders or suicides but in the 1980s these became more ubiquitous and oppressive. There’s a room of works devoted to one particular murder, of one particular woman, one among so many thousands of what are nowadays called ‘femicides’, men murdering women. González memorialised this victim not only in painting but in a big printed fabric which is laid out on display here.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing different versions of ‘Murdered woman at a lodging’ (1985) (photo by the author)
These later works are quite a bit more sombre and tragic. She switched to a conscious decision to ‘bear witness’ and a series of works on the ground floor memorialises the ever-growing number of the dead and, increasingly, focuses on the womenfolk who weep and bury their men. Hence the extensive series Las Delicias (1996–8) featuring compositions based on images of weeping women published in newspapers.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing some of the ‘Las Delicias’ series (photo by the author)
Or Entierro en el Museo Nacional (Burial at the National Museum) (1991) in which she began collaging images from different news sources into surreal, almost mythical, scenes of violence, rendered in an uncanny colour palette – sickly greens, luminous yellows, and glowing blues.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican (photo by the author)
Alongside the weeping women, she produced vivid satirical stylised images of the men in charge, the classic sunglasses-wearing authoritarian presidents and army leaders assembled in meeting places or round tables.
Los papagayos (The Parrots) by Beatriz González (1987) Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, gift of Jorge M. Pérez. Credit © Beatriz González. Photo by Oriol Tarridas
Decoración de interiores (Interior Decoration) (1981), is just part of a 140-metre-long curtain printed with an image of then-Colombian President Julio César Turbay Ayala at a party. The party was organised to celebrate the military officer who passed the security law that caused Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Márquez and others into exile and González was struck by the ‘grotesque’ contrast between this cultivated image of exuberant frivolity and the violence of his regime.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing ‘Interior Decoration’ (1981) (photo by the author)
I haven’t mentioned the wallpapers yet. Three or four rooms feature entire walls covered in her trademark acid-coloured and stylised figures. Thematically, the biggest and most sombre is also the final work in the exhibition, A Posteriori (2022). This installation derives from Anonymous Auras (2007–09) González’s major site-specific intervention at the Central Cemetery in Bogotá. When she and colleagues learned that six neoclassical mausoleums were going to be pulled down, she intervened to save them, and then to full the niches with the repeated silhouettes of cargueros, the porters who carry the never-ending dead. Devoting a room to just this wall covering, and placing a stark bench in the middle, converts it into a chapel of memorial and remembrance.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing ‘A Posteriori’ (2022) (photo by the author)
That’s a good enough overview. There are other striking works, such as the massive reimagining she made of Picasso’s Guernica, painted onto 100 or so wall tiles and taking up an entire long wall.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing her reversioning of Picasso’s Guernica, titled ‘Mural for a Socialist Factory’ (1981) (photo by the author)
Did I actually like any of these works? Well, I admired the way she developed an early style and then worked it through, I admired her branching out into furniture, fabrics and wallpaper, all very inventive. But the images themselves, with a handful of exceptions, no, I didn’t really like, not really, sorry. Whenever I visit a gallery I play a simple game which is, once I’ve finished crawling round reading all the labels and processing all the facts, I then saunter back through the whole thing looking again at the works choosing one piece from each room which, if I was rich, I’d buy and take home.
In this entire big, vivid, comprehensive, thorough, beautifully laid out and respectful exhibition, I saw only a handful of things I’d really want to have around me and, as it happens, neither of them were paintings, the medium González is known for. They were these charming totem poles or sculptures, made from readymade objects, repainted and arranged. One was a plaster statue of Jesus placed on top of a tower of painted car tyres. Nearby was a little tower of pre-Colombian masks, painted in striking black and red, arranged to make a totem pole. These are completely unlike anything else in the show but, I’m afraid, were the only things which really pulled my daisy.
Installation view of Beatriz González @ the Barbican, showing some of her totems (photo by the author)
Related links
- Beatriz González continues at the Barbican Gallery until 10 May 2026
- Beatriz González: Tate article
- Beatriz González: Wikipedia article
- Beatriz González article on the De Pont website
- Beatriz González on the Galerie Peter Kilchmann website
Related reviews
- Spain and the Hispanic World @ the Royal Academy (April 2023)
- Urban Impulses: Latin American Photography 1959 to 2016 @ the Photographers’ Gallery (July 2019)
- The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson (2009)
- Barbican reviews
- Women artists
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