I recently visited an exhibition of one of the most rebellious Colombian artist Beatriz González (1932, Bucaramanga, Colombia – 2026, Bogotá, Colombia), on display at the Barbican Centre. The exhibition situates González’s work within the complex history of Colombia, and I found it immensely poignant and thought-provoking. At the later stage the main focus of her art was to expose the way state violence operates not only through physical force, but through culture
Drawing on imagery from across decades, ranging from worn reproductions of canonical Western paintings to newspaper clippings documenting violence and loss, these disparate materials were reworked into a distinctive visual language characterised by flattened forms, graphic compositions, and a bold, often dissonant colour palette. Across her artistic forms of expression, González addressed the persistence of violence in Colombia, while also examining socially constructed notions of taste, value, and class, as well as the displacement of communities and the impact of the ‘Western’ canon on the Latin American culture.
Her early work demonstrates a critical engagement with art history. During her studies at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá in the early 1960s, at a time when American Abstract Expressionism dominated artistic discourse, González deliberately turned instead to the work of Diego Velázquez and Johannes Vermeer.
Inspired in part by Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda (1635), she produced a series of paintings that dissected the conventions of history painting. These works were not acts of homage but of transformation, raising fundamental questions about authorship, reproduction, and the possibility of making canonical images her own.
La rendición de Breda (1962) is a seminal early work by González that marks her transition into reinterpreting Western art history through a Colombian lens. In this oil painting, she adapts Diego Velázquez’s 17th-century masterpiece, replacing the refined Spanish soldiers with figures characterized by thick, gestural brushwork and somber tones. The work challenges the traditional hierarchy of fine art by translating a canonical European image into a local, caricatured aesthetic.
Similarly, her reinterpretations of Vermeer’s domestic interiors, particularly The Lacemaker and Woman Reading a Letter, translate scenes of quiet introspection into compositions marked by bold colour contrasts and formal simplification. In doing so, González destabilises the perceived refinement of these images, recontextualising them within her own visual and cultural framework. As she later reflected, this process involved “breaking” the image away from its original context, allowing it to exist anew.
La encajera is a modern reinterpretation of Johannes Vermeer’s 17th-century masterpiece, ‘The Lacemaker’. Beatriz González utilizes a simplified, almost abstract visual language, reducing the original’s intricate details into bold blocks of color and flat planes. This painting attempts to ‘translate’ European art history into a contemporary Latin American context, questioning the notions of ‘high art’ and reproduction.
By the mid-1960s, González turned increasingly towards popular visual culture in search of a more personal and locally grounded artistic language. Rejecting the notion of the artist as a producer of rarefied objects: “I did not want to be a lady who paints”, she began to work extensively with found imagery from magazines and newspapers. These sources, which ranged from studio portraits to tabloid photographs, enabled her to engage with what she described as the “temperature” of Colombia lived and social reality.
La niña de la comunión (1964) marks her departure from traditional academic painting toward a style influenced by commercial graphics and local culture. The work features flat, unmodulated areas of bold colour and simplified forms, a technique the artist used to reinterpret images found in newspapers and mass-market prints. By transforming a sentimental religious milestone into a vibrant, almost abstract composition, González critiques the middle-class values and visual culture of 1960s Colombia.
A pivotal moment in this shift can be seen in Los suicidas del Sisga (1965), a series based on a newspaper photograph of a young couple who died by suicide.
In these works, González translates the blurred, low-quality reproduction into planes of vivid colour, emphasising distortion, flatness, and fragmentation. The figures’ faces appear to dissolve, while their repeated depiction resists erasure, reflecting her broader concern with the fragility of memory in the face of media saturation. As she observed, the rapid circulation of images contributes to their disappearance; her work attempts to counter this by fixing them in another form.
Los suicidas del Sisga (1965) is a foundational work of Colombian Pop Art, based on a low-quality newspaper photograph of a couple who committed suicide in the Sisga dam to preserve their love. González translates the grainy, distorted press image into flat, vibrant planes of color, emphasizing the graphic quality of mass-media reproductions. By simplifying the figures and using a non-naturalistic palette, she explores the intersection of tragedy, provincial taste, and the consumption of news in Colombian society.
These works make tangible the emotional impact of loss. Through them, González asks us not to look away, but to confront grief directly. Across these paintings, she suggests that death is an everyday experience, one that persists through images imprinted in collective memory. As she stated, “Colombia is a nation of witnesses,” and she calls on us to bear witness alongside her.
Her interest in popular imagery extended to the prints produced by Gráficas Molinari, a company that distributed inexpensive, widely circulated reproductions across Colombia and Latin America. Often inspired by European art, these prints occupied an ambiguous position between high and low culture. González’s engagement with them was both critical and analytical: she examined not only their aesthetic qualities but also their appeal, particularly in relation to aspirations of class and taste. In her painted reinterpretations, motifs such as mother-and-child figures and mythological subjects are flattened and stylised, becoming what she termed “meta-representations”, images that reflect on their own status as images.
Towards the late 1960s, González also began to explore the construction of public and political iconography. Her reworkings of portraits of Simón Bolívar, alongside ironic depictions of figures such as Elizabeth II, investigate how repetition and reproduction contribute to the formation of cultural authority. At the same time, she expanded her material practice, abandoning traditional oil on canvas in favour of industrial materials such as enamel paint on metal. By incorporating furniture and domestic objects such as beds, tables, and cabinets into her work, she further collapsed distinctions between fine art and everyday life, while drawing attention to the socio-economic contexts in which such objects circulate.
La oración en el huerto depicts the biblical scene of Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. González utilizes her signature style of flat, saturated color planes and simplified silhouettes, which she often adapted from popular commercial prints or art historical masterpieces. By stripping away traditional chiaroscuro and detail, she transforms a familiar religious icon into a bold, graphic statement that bridges the gap between high art and mass-produced kitsch.
San Luis Gonzaga painting is a hallmark of Gonzalez ‘pop’ style, utilizing enamel on a metal sheet to reinterpret traditional religious iconography. The painting depicts Saint Aloysius Gonzaga with his characteristic attributes: the crucifix and lilies rendered in flat, saturated blocks of color that strip away classical depth. By using industrial materials and a graphic aesthetic, González critiques the mass production of religious imagery and the ‘provincial’ taste of Colombian society.
La actual Reina de Inglaterra shows Gonzalez unique approach to Pop Art by reinterpreting a mass-media image of Queen Elizabeth II. The artist employs a flat, graphic style with a bold, non-naturalistic color palette, including a vibrant yellow dress and a striking blue sash against a deep black background. By translating a formal royal portrait into this simplified aesthetic, González explores themes of provincialism, the consumption of international icons, and the intersection of high and low culture.
Caja de musica is a characteristic example of Beatriz González’s ‘furniture’ period, where she applied simplified, flatly colored versions of iconic Western art masterpieces onto domestic objects. Here, she reinterprets James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s ‘Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1’ (Whistler’s Mother), replacing the somber tones with a vibrant red dress and placing it within a decorative wooden box. By transposing ‘high art’ onto ‘low’ or kitsch domestic items, González critiques the provincial consumption of European culture in Colombia and explores the intersection of taste, class, and national identity.
Mona Lisa is a quintessential example of Beatriz González’s practice of ‘transcribing’ iconic Western masterpieces onto mass-produced, domestic Colombian furniture. By integrating a flattened, pop-art rendition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa into a wooden hall tree, the artist critiques the provincial and often kitsch consumption of European high culture in Latin America. The use of bold, non-naturalistic colors and the functional object format challenges traditional hierarchies between fine art and everyday craft.
The inspiration for 10 metros de Renoir was a postcard of Auguste Renoir’s Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette (1876). González repeatedly copied Renoir’s al fresco dance scene across a ten-metre roll of paper, replacing the artist’s quivering brushstrokes with flat silhouettes filled with deep purples, blues and yellows. She considered this work the culmination of her engagement with the history of art, literally cutting up her source.
From the 1980s onwards, González’s work took on an increasingly explicit political dimension, shaped in part by the intensification of violence in Colombia. The 1985 siege of the Palace of Justice, ordered by President Belisario Betancur, marked a significant turning point. In its aftermath, her practice shifted from satirical critique towards a more direct engagement with mourning and testimony. Works from this period employ repetition as a strategy to counter the erasure of victims within the rapid cycles of news media, insisting instead on remembrance.
Her use of unconventional materials continued to play a crucial role in this later work. In a series of textile-based pieces, which she referred to as her “Gobelins tapestries,” González transferred images of victims of violence onto mass-produced bedspreads. These works juxtapose the intimacy of domestic space with the brutality of public violence, revealing how deeply such violence permeates everyday life. At the same time, they expose systemic forms of oppression, particularly gender-based violence, that persist across time.
Throughout her career, González remained committed to the idea that representing violence is both necessary and fraught. Her work does not seek to resolve this tension but to inhabit it, using repetition, transformation, and material displacement as means of preserving memory. In doing so, she offers a powerful critique of the ways images circulate within contemporary culture, while also asserting their potential to resist forgetting.
Asesinada Mujer En Hospedaje Positivo (1985) is a significant piece from the artist’s ‘Telones’ (Curtains) series, where she appropriated sensationalist news imagery and transposed it onto domestic fabrics. The reclining figure is rendered in flat, saturated orange and black tones, creating a stark contrast against the ornate, mass-produced floral pattern of the curtain support. This technique critiques the intersection of tragedy, media consumption, and middle-class domesticity in Colombia.
Señor Presidente, qué honor estar con usted en este momento histórico (Mr President, What an Honour to Be with You at This Historic Moment) (1987) and Los papagayos (The Parrots) (1987) depict the military, the president and his cabinet using an uncanny colour palette. Repetition became an important strategy across González’s practice. Her use of repeated motifs now became a way of addressing the country’s seemingly endless violence, and of countering the rapid news cycles in which images of victims are quickly forgotten. Gonzalez started to collage multiple images in composite tableaux, conveying a complexity of narrative, temporality and emotion during one of the most violent periods of Colombia’s history.
In Los papagayos, Gonzalez utilizes a repetitive, frieze-like composition to depict military figures in a style influenced by Pop Art and commercial printing. By using a garish palette of reds, greens, and yellows, González transforms the solemnity of political power into a grotesque, parrot-like spectacle. The piece serves as a sharp critique of the Colombian political landscape and the cyclical nature of its leadership during the 20th century.
Decoración de interiores (Interior Decoration) (1981), Beatriz Gonzalez
This monumental screen-printed fabric installation reinterprets Édouard Manet’s ‘Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ through a vibrant, flattened Pop Art aesthetic. Beatriz González, a central figure in Colombian contemporary art, uses the medium of a domestic curtain to critique the provincial adoption of European ‘high culture’ and the commercialization of art. The work consists of a 140-meter-long repeating pattern that challenges traditional hierarchies by transforming a masterpiece into a mass-produced decorative object.
Decoración de interiores is a monumental screen-printed curtain that repeats a scene of former Colombian President Julio César Turbay Ayala at a social gathering. Beatriz González uses a flat, graphic style inspired by mass media and commercial printing to critique the political and social elite of Colombia. By placing a political image on a domestic object like a curtain, she blurs the lines between public history and private life, a hallmark of her ‘provincial pop’ aesthetic.
González’s works from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s are extraordinary testaments to loss. From her reworking of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica to paintings addressing the displacement of Indigenous communities and the horrors of conflict, her work bears witness to the world around her. These works invoke centuries-long histories of extractive power relations, intertwined with the violence of armed conflict and the drug trade. While each piece references specific incidents and individuals drawn from news imagery, González transforms her sources into composite, almost mythic scenes that evoke multiple temporal and global histories of violence.
Mural para una fábrica de café is a pop-art reinterpretation of Pablo Picasso’s iconic anti-war masterpiece, Guernica. The work utilizes a vibrant, flattened color palette of yellow and blue to translate the tragic imagery into a graphic, almost commercial aesthetic. Originally commissioned for a coffee factory, the piece reflects González’s career-long interest in how ‘high art’ is consumed, reproduced, and transformed within popular culture and local Latin American contexts.
Amgel de la guarda features a found plaster religious icon painted in a vibrant, monochromatic blue, a signature technique she used to recontextualize popular ‘kitsch’ objects. The angel is positioned atop a stack of painted car tires, a juxtaposition that bridges the gap between the divine and the mundane while referencing the urban landscape of Colombia. The installation is set against her famous ‘Zulia, Zulia, Zulia’ wallpaper (1970), which repeats the portrait of former Colombian President Julio César Turbay Ayala to critique the intersection of political power and religious devotion.
This installation by Beatriz González features a traditional ‘Divino Niño’ (Child Jesus) statue, a ubiquitous religious icon in Colombia, placed atop a pedestal painted with military camouflage. The background consists of her famous ‘Zócalo de la comedia’ wallpaper from 1983, which repeats the image of former President Julio César Turbay Ayala alongside the phrase ‘Este Gobierno no tiene dueños.’ The work serves as a biting critique of the intersection between religious devotion, political absurdity, and the pervasive presence of militarism in Colombian society.
Los remeros features Gonzalez signature style of flat, saturated color planes and simplified silhouettes. The composition, framed by theatrical curtains, depicts two figures in a boat, one rowing and the other holding a bright green circular object. González often uses images from mass media or historical sources, reinterpreting them to comment on the social and political realities of Colombia through a lens of ‘provincial’ Pop Art.
Tunjuelito depicts figures in a landscape, referencing the Tunjuelito River area in Bogotá, a site often associated with social and environmental issues . González uses flat planes of color to create a sense of depth and narrative, bridging the gap between high art and popular culture.
In Los Cargueros Gonzalez utilizes her signature style of flat, saturated color planes and simplified silhouettes to address the socio-political landscape of her home country. The work depicts figures carrying a large yellow bundle, a recurring motif in her ‘Cargueros’ series that symbolizes the anonymous victims of Colombia’s internal conflict and the labor of mourning. By stripping away individual features, González transforms a specific scene of tragedy into a universal icon of collective memory and grief. Her use of vibrant, almost commercial colors creates a jarring contrast with the somber subject matter, a hallmark of her ‘provincial Pop’ aesthetic.
Empalizada is a significant work by González, featuring her signature use of flat, saturated colors and simplified forms derived from media imagery. The painting depicts a blue-toned figure in a posture of mourning or submission, set against a dark, jagged fence that suggests a barrier or a site of confinement. This piece reflects González’s critical engagement with the social and political realities of Colombia, transforming everyday visual culture into a powerful commentary on violence and memory.
La Diferencia showcases Gonzalez unique approach to ‘Pop de provincias’ (provincial Pop). The painting translates a newspaper image of a funeral into a composition of flat, bold colors and distorted figures, emphasizing the collective trauma of Colombian society. By stripping away detail and focusing on silhouette and saturated hues, González elevates a specific news event into a timeless icon of mourning and political critique.
Zulia is a poignant work by Beatriz González that confronts the political violence and forced disappearances in Colombia during the 1980s. The painting depicts the recovery of a body from the Zulia River, utilizing a flattened, graphic style derived from photojournalism to create a powerful memorial. The stark contrast between the dark water and the vibrant teal of the limb emphasizes the dehumanization of the victims, while the mourning figures at the top create a frieze of collective grief.
Women increasingly became the protagonists of González’s work from the 1990s onwards. They appear as mothers, sisters, partners, those left behind after the premature deaths of countless men. Their images, frequently reproduced in Colombian newspapers, became a recurring focus. The series Las Delicias (1996–98) was prompted by an attack by the FARC guerrilla group on a military base of the same name, in which soldiers were killed or taken hostage. The resulting paintings depict women in gestures of grief, often framed by curtains that suggest the exposure of an intimate moment of mourning.
Las Delicias is a series of oil paintings that captures the collective mourning of the Colombian people during a period of intense internal conflict. The figures are depicted with their faces covered, a motif González frequently used to represent the anonymity and universality of victims of violence. Her style utilizes flat planes of saturated color and simplified forms, bridging the gap between high art and the visual language of mass media and popular culture. The repetition of the mourning pose across the panels creates a powerful sense of collective sorrow and social commentary.
Llorona (1970) is a seminal work by Beatriz González, a pioneer of Pop Art in Colombia. The painting features a stylized, weeping figure that draws from both religious iconography and the collective mourning associated with Colombia’s history of violence. Using flat areas of color and a simplified, graphic composition, González critiques the ‘provincial’ aesthetic while elevating popular imagery to the status of high art.
Los de arriba y los de abajo features a dark, silhouetted figure in the foreground, contrasted against a vibrant green landscape depicted as if on a hanging cloth. González uses flat planes of color and simplified forms to explore themes of social hierarchy and the Colombian landscape, often drawing from media imagery. The work reflects her ‘Pop de provincias’ style, which adapts international Pop Art techniques to address local political and social realities.
Los que se quedan (Those who stay) is a poignant work by González that addresses the collective trauma of her nation’s internal conflict. The painting features a series of coffins containing portraits of the ‘disappeared,’ rendered in a flat, graphic style that draws from newspaper photography and pop art. By placing these somber images under the harsh light of a single lamp, González critiques the way violence is mediated and consumed in contemporary society.
These images are intensified by González’s striking colour juxtapositions: cyan against black and brown, chartreuse against deep blue, burnt orange against cerulean. She often incorporated symbolic elements into clothing, such as teardrop motifs or pastoral patterns, adding further layers of meaning. In Autorretrato desnuda llorando (Nude Self-Portrait, Crying), she implicates herself within this field of grief, offering a rare and vulnerable act of identification.
In Los predicadores (The Preachers), González responded to the murder of three Indigenous rights activists from the United States. A haunting drawing of their bodies was later transformed into wallpaper, where repetition underscores the persistence of violence.
Similarly, her portraits of Yolanda Izquierdo, an activist murdered for defending land rights, reimagine documentary imagery through scenes of imagined hope and possibility.
Later works also engage with processes of mourning and restitution. Paintings from 2010 depict state-organised funerary ceremonies in which victims’ remains were returned to their families in marked coffins, suggesting a fragile movement towards recognition and repair.
Tele-periodista depicts a television news presenter in a flattened, graphic style, using a vibrant palette of pinks and yellows that contrasts with the somber, almost ghostly expression of the subject. By framing the image within a simulated television set, González explores the intersection of private domestic life and the public dissemination of news in 1970s Colombia, highlighting the banality and repetition of televised information.
This diptych, titled ‘Cargueros de sueños’ (Dream Carriers), is a prime example of Beatriz González’s ‘provincial pop’ style, which utilizes flat, saturated color planes and simplified silhouettes. The work depicts figures carrying landscapes on their backs, a recurring motif in her oeuvre that references the ‘cargueros’ of Colombia while serving as a metaphor for the weight of memory and national identity. Through her graphic technique, González transforms images from mass media and journalism into poignant reflections on the socio-political history and collective trauma of her country.
La mutila features a silhouetted figure holding a vibrant green ‘mútila’, a traditional regional garment against a flat, saturated yellow background that emphasizes graphic clarity. By using simplified forms and a bold, non-naturalistic palette, González elevates everyday vernacular objects to iconic status, commenting on the intersection of local identity and mass-media representation.
Ceremonia de la caja is a poignant work by Beatriz González that utilizes her characteristic flat, graphic style and vibrant color palette to address themes of death and mourning. The painting depicts three figures in profile carrying a red casket, a recurring motif in her work that references the long history of conflict and violence in her native Colombia. By stripping away specific details, González elevates a scene of local tragedy into a universal symbol of collective grief and memory.
Following the beginning of peace negotiations in 2012 between the Colombian government and the FARC, González turned towards broader global concerns, including climate crisis, migration, and environmental destruction. In Los inundados (The Flooded), she depicts displaced figures moving through water, transforming a specific disaster into a more universal image of vulnerability.
Las Inundaciones is part of a series created in response to the devastating 2010-2011 floods in Colombia, which displaced thousands of people. González utilizes her signature ‘Pop de vanguardia’ style, characterized by flat planes of saturated color and simplified silhouettes derived from newspaper photojournalism. By isolating the figures of a man carrying a child against a vibrant teal background, she transforms a specific journalistic record into a universal icon of human resilience and the tragedy of displacement.
Cinta depicts three prone figures wrapped in shrouds, a recurring motif in her work addressing the victims of her country’s long-standing internal conflict. The composition is characterized by a somber, dark background and the use of ‘X’ marks in the corners, referencing the niches of the Central Cemetery in Bogotá. González employs a graphic, almost flat style that transforms tragic journalistic imagery into a powerful, collective symbol of mourning and memory.
In Historias Wiwa (Wiwa Stories), she responded to a tragedy affecting the Indigenous Wiwa community, while in Paisajes elementales (Elemental Landscapes), she connected environmental and political violence across different regions of Colombia. These works underscore the persistence of precarity across both human and natural landscapes.
In 2003, upon learning that structures within Bogotá’s Central Cemetery were to be demolished, González collaborated with fellow artist Doris Salcedo in an effort to preserve the site. Although unsuccessful, this experience informed Auras anónimas (Anonymous Auras), in which González reproduced the recurring motif of figures carrying a corpse across thousands of graves. The work serves as a collective memorial, honouring the anonymous dead and addressing the absence of adequate spaces for mourning.
I highly recommend this exhibition.
