Beatriz González Born 1932 in Bucaramanga, Colombia

-Died 2026 in Bogotá, Colombia

Through her paintings, drawings, and sculptures, Beatriz González picked out the often tragic moments of this troubled era, acting as a contemporary witness. Constant armed conflicts, including a ten-year civil war (1948–1958) and then the 52-year armed conflict between the Colombian state and the guerrilla movement led by the FARC (1964–2016), had a lasting impact on her perception of society. A controversial choice of subjects, which in the first two decades of her artistic practice, starting from the early 1960s, she approached through a critical sense of humor and irony. The press was of vital importance to her work, as Beatriz González collected images from scandal sheets and advertisements as substantial sources for her thematic remakes. She liked to “start from something that already existed,” as she stated: a graphic referent, a print, filtering it through a creative process. The modesty of Mrs González‘s technique tended to mislead the observer, giving her artwork a seemingly light appearance: vital, bold colors and irrational spaces for very concrete and serious subjects. Her choice of color and technique was original and very related to the country. It was the burgundy, blue, green, orange, and purple—colors of the Colombian countryside, as she experienced them in the architecture of Bucaramanga as a child.

Since 2016, Beatriz González focused on a series of subjects around the politically charged figure of collective mourning, which had increasingly found their way into her work over the past twenty years. In the context of different narratives, the figure appeared as an abstracted black silhouette or as an allegory with simplified female features and ran like a connecting thread through the works in the exhibition. Simple outlines and generously applied areas of color in rich violet, green, earthy red, or mustard yellow dominated the composition. What appeared at first glance to be an everyday rural scene was a subtle reappraisal of a series of tragic events that gained increasing attention in the national and global press since the signing of the peace.

In Beatriz González's work, it was an approach towards the truth that silently reminded the viewer to remember. Her motifs underwent a transformation as she reworked press photographs collected from newspapers, translating them into drawings and repeated patterns. Through this process of refinement, they acquired an iconic presence. Her art went beyond merely appropriating press clippings; it recontextualized them, offering a lens through which to perceive historical events and collective memory. Her paintings created a pictorial world that, only on closer inspection, spoke of the tragic losses. Each work was like a poetic metaphor for the emptiness left by the missing. As in almost all her series of works, the artist played with repetition. While the silhouettes in the individual works were repeated in new combinations each time, their outlines were reduced to such an extent that they almost became a geometric pattern, as a sort of alphabet. The principle of repetition was intensely heightened in the wallpaper.

Beatriz González exhibited widely in some of the world’s leading museums. In 2023, the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) in Mexico City presented a solo exhibition, which subsequently traveled to the De Pont Museum in Tilburg in 2024. In 2019, the Pérez Art Museum Miami (PAMM) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) co-organized a major retrospective. In 2017, the CAPC Bordeaux devoted a comprehensive solo exhibition to the artist, accompanied by a catalogue; the show later traveled to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and Kunst-Werke in Berlin (2018). That same year, her works were also presented at Documenta 14. In 2015, her works were included in the landmark group exhibition The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern, London. An extensive interview with Mrs González was published in the volume Conversations in Colombia in 2015 by the art historian and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Her works are held in major international collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Museo Nacional de Colombia, Bogotá; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the De Pont Museum, Tilburg.

With the co-production between the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, the Barbican Centre in London, and the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, her landmark retrospective continues this trajectory, reaffirming her place as one of the most significant voices in contemporary art from Latin America.

Beatriz González died on 9 January 2026 at 93 years old in Bogotá, Colombia.