Colombian Painter Dies at 93

Beatriz González, a Colombian painter who ranks among the most important Latin American artists of the 20th century, died on Friday at her home in Bogotá at 93. Galerie Peter Kilchmann, her Zurich-based representative, announced her passing but did not specify a cause.

González’s wide-ranging oeuvre tested painterly taboos and flirted with controversy. Working with a color palette that was often termed garish or unpleasing to the eye, she initially gained fame during the 1960s by remaking art historical masterpieces, then pivoted during the ’80s, a period when she began to paint explicitly political images critiquing her nation’s government and acts of violence that made headlines.

Her art rarely fit neatly into predetermined categories. Her paintings of the ’60s and ’70s, which featured luridly hued remakes of beloved works by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci, have sometimes been called Pop art, though she disavowed any relationship with that movement. Her political works from the ’80s onward share affinities with many protest-minded pieces of the era, but she often stuck with her chosen medium of painting while others opted for installation or sculpture.

“Yes, sometimes I see myself like a transgressor that didn’t fit in her time,” González said in an interview with Tate Modern, which featured her art in its 2015 show “The World Goes Pop,” a survey that has been credited with globalizing the Pop art canon.

Though recognized widely well before that exhibition, González has since ascended to international stardom, appearing in Documenta 14 in 2017 and the Museum of Modern Art’s 2019 rehang. She had retrospectives in both of those years, and she died as a third one now makes the rounds. That show will go on view in February at the Barbican Centre in London, having premiered last year at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; it will also visit the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo.

Beatriz González was born in 1932 in Bucaramanga, a Colombian city that she later credited with influencing her art. “I half close my eyes and I can see the colors of Bucaramanga, that I saw in my childhood,” she once said. “The colors of my paintings are those of the sunsets I would watch with my father.” Raised during a period of turmoil and civil war known as La Violencia, González developed an interest in art in high school, but she chose not to study it in college because she “didn’t want to spend time learning something that I thought I already knew,” as she told the artist Amalia Pica in a 2017 interview.

Instead, she opted to study architecture at the National University of Colombia. But because she only was made to take one art history class, she found herself disinterested and dropped out. She returned to Bucaramanga, where she took a range of jobs: at a tobacco factory, as a window display maker, and more. Then, at the urging of her father, she decided to study art more seriously, enrolling in the graphic design program of the University of the Andes in 1957.

Her breakthrough came in the ’60s, when González produced such works as her “Suicidas del Sisga” paintings, which are now considered legendary. Painted in 1965, these works were based on photographs of a young religious couple who threw themselves into the Sisga Dam, fearing that they might not achieve purity in this life. González’s representations of the couple were based on images that appeared in the press, initiating an interest in remaking pictures from the media that would remain for her whole career. Her pictures are notably fuzzy around the edges, an allusion to the loss of detail that occurred when the couple’s image was printed in newspapers and magazines.

She then turned her focus to pop culture and began appropriating the compositions of historical artworks for her own canvases. Where these masterpieces hung in museums, González’s remakes were sometimes allowed to infiltrate the world more broadly. Diez Metros de Renoir (Ten Meters of Renoir, 1977) involved repainting the Impressionist’s painting Bal du moulin de la Galette at a grand scale—a size bigger than the original, notably. She then cut up her version and sold it to the public by the centimeter.

Other works from the ’70s were even stranger. For one series, she inset her art historical remakes in vanities, bed frames, and other pieces of furniture. When they showed at the Bienal de São Paulo in 1971, curator Marta Traba called them “marginal art,” finding no other obvious way to explain them.

“At the beginning I was keen to see how a work rooted in Western art history could be transformed, transfigured, once it reached us here in Colombia,” González said in 2022. “What happens when someone discovers a reproduction of an artwork in a book?”

During the ’80s, she began to translate that fascination with image culture to current events and political upheaval, clipping pictures from the media related to President Julio César Turbay Ayala, who was elected in 1978. She made such works as Interior Decoration (1981), a vast painting on curtain in which Turbay Ayala can be seen at a party among many guests. Her composition was cobbled together from many different images in the media and was sold by the meter, suggesting that the president could be commodified and copied with ease. The piece was understood to be critical of his administration; González recalled a heightened police presence at some of her exhibition openings at the time.

The 1985 siege on the Palace of Justice by the leftist group M-19 initiated a “sea change” in her work, she said, spurring her to drop any sense of irony for a more serious sensibility. “What struck me most was how justice itself had been killed,” she said, referring to the dozens of people killed while armed soldiers sought to quell the M-19 group, which had taken the Supreme Court hostage with the aim of holding the conservative President Belisario Betancur accountable for his actions.

In the following years, she would paint such subjects as Yolanda Izquierdo, a human rights advocate, and mothers weeping following the Las Delicias massacre in 1996.

In 2007, she even produced Auras anónimas, one of her most ambitious projects, which involved filling more than 8,000 niches in a Bogotá cemetery with printed silhouettes of workers carrying corpses. “I had worked on tombstones previously and thought they could be printed using manual screen printing, reproducing images of a theme prevalent in national photojournalism: men carrying corpses, victims of the war,” she said. “With these figures, I set out to construct a symbol that represented what was happening in the country.”

González’s impact within Colombia is widespread, in part because she did not only work as an artist. She also was a curator at the National Museum of Colombia, and for two decades, she served as an adviser to the Museo de Arte del Banco de la Repúblic, helping to grow the bank’s collection. She also directed the educational program of the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá.

But it is her art that has proven most enduring. When her 2019 retrospective visited Bogotá, Colombian curator Eugenio Viola wrote in his Artforum review that González was “one of the most influential living Colombian artists.”

Despite all that fame, and despite the boldness of her art, González often described herself as a reserved person. But, as she told Amalia Pica, “It’s typical of shy people: we are generally very reserved but, when we do want to say something, we go off like a bomb.