Beatriz González Retrospective: A Gripping Yet Difficult Journey Through Colombia's Turmoil
The art of Beatriz González is saturated with vivid light, bold colour, and the stark reality of bloodshed. Her sprawling and uneven retrospective, now on display at the Barbican in London, mirrors the turbulent politics and pervasive violence of her native Colombia. This exhibition showcases the breadth of her work, which deftly addresses art history, popular culture, provincialism, and universal themes. At times, her approach is as sharp and critical as that of a political cartoonist, such as when she depicts generals as a row of anonymous, blank-faced parrots. González once famously declared, "I did not want to be a lady who paints." Born in the provincial town of Bucaramanga in 1932, she passed away this January in Bogotá at the age of 93, shortly before this exhibition travelled from the Pinacoteca in São Paolo to its current London venue.
A Compelling Yet Challenging Exhibition
González's show is undeniably compelling, but it can also be difficult to bear at times. She did not begin painting seriously until her 30s, starting with loose transcriptions and variations on masterpieces like Diego Velázquez's The Surrender of Breda from 1634-35 and Vermeer's The Lacemaker from 1669-70. In these early works, she attentively reinterpreted these classics, perhaps seeing Vermeer's subject as a stand-in for herself as a young Colombian artist. Soon, she began to flatten forms and intensify the emotional temperature, making the paintings distinctly her own. While she teetered on the edge of abstraction, she never fully embraced it. Her exposure to European art was limited, despite some travel to Europe and New York, and much of her knowledge came from reproductions, often of poor quality.
An Avid Collector of Macabre Imagery
From an early stage, González was an avid consumer and collector of images. She amassed a vast archive of postcards, news stories, advertisements, and press images, frequently focusing on macabre and salacious events, street incidents, and crime scenes. This collection reflected the texture and turmoil of Colombia, and she never discarded anything, allowing it all to feed into her art. The current exhibition features annotated displays of these images in vitrines, punctuating the show with a sense of trepidation. Among them are masked wrestlers, bodybuilders, beauty queens, suicides, old master reproductions, Catholic priests in Indigenous feathered head-dresses, Jackie Onassis on a camel, a young Queen Elizabeth II, saints, religious kitsch, and gallery flyers. The longer one looks, the more one wonders: what's coming next?
More Than a Repository: A Work in Itself
González's archive, akin to Gerhard Richter's Atlas, is more than just a repository of source images; it is a work in itself, a method of processing her times through visual thinking. What is absent from this archive is equally significant: the decades of disappearances, torture, kidnappings, internecine warfare, narcoterrorism, and battles between political factions, left and rightwing guerrilla groups, paramilitaries, and assaults on Indigenous rights. In 1965, González was drawn to the story of a young couple, Antonio Martinez Bonza and Tulia Vargas, who threw themselves into a reservoir at the Sisga dam near Bogotá. Bonza's suicide note cited a desire to save his girlfriend's purity from a sinful world. González painted several versions of their portrait, flattening and simplifying the forms with bright colours, their hands melded together and faces rendered as masks of normality and void. Her use of bright colour should never be mistaken for optimism.
Grisly Reports and Revisited Images
She began creating prints based on the grisliest newspaper crime reports, such as the murder of a homeless bullfighter in a furniture store and a man committing hara-kiri on the street. These works depicted unaccountable deaths, nameless bodies, and senseless killings. González noted, "What caught my attention was the presence of death, the position of the heads, or the disarray of a bedroom where a homicide had taken place." Sometimes, she would return to images years or even decades later. In 1985, she revisited two 1969 prints depicting an unknown sex worker found dead on a mattress and the corpse of an elderly man, Catalino Diaz Izquierdo. She repainted these images on cheap patterned bedspreads, with the old man twisted on a repeat pattern of deer at a stream and the anonymous woman on a bedspread bursting with flowers. At first glance, these might appear calm, as if the subjects were asleep, but the twisted mouths, unnatural positions, and blood reveal the horror.
Moving Beyond Oil: Enamel and Kitsch
For a long period, González moved away from oil painting, working instead with enamel and painting on cheap metal furniture rather than canvas. She created glutinous portraits of cardinals on bedside tables, emblazoned a version of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper on a hideous low table, and painted a tormented Christ on the base of a metal bedstead, revelling in kitsch. She also painted sickly portraits on TV screens, including one of Colombian president Julio César Turbay, who had been part of a military junta during La Violencia. In 1981, Turbay was photographed singing Mexican folk songs at a party celebrating a military officer who passed a new security law, prompting writer Gabriel García Márquez and others to flee into exile. González turned this image into a pleated curtain titled Interior Decoration, which could be purchased by the yard.
Responding to Escalating Violence
In 1985, the M-19 guerrilla group besieged the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, leading to a military storming that caused a fire killing about 100 people. González responded with Mr President, What an Honour to Be With You at This Historic Moment, a large drawing showing the smiling president and his ministers at work with a charred body on the table before them. As violence escalated through the 1980s and 90s, her paintings became more direct and biting, yet her responses took on a more elegiac tone. Women cover their faces, a rower gives a suspicious look, and corpses often have more presence than the living, even when hidden in coffins.
Final Acts: Anonymous Auras and Remembrance
In 2003, when the mayor of Bogotá planned to demolish mausoleums in the Central Cemetery housing victims of conflict, González and fellow artist Doris Salcedo attempted to save them. Though the project floundered and the remains were removed, González had the idea of sealing the empty niches with small tombstones. Each of the 8,956 graves was emblazoned with a silkscreened silhouette of two men carrying a corpse, produced in eight variations. The final room at the Barbican is lined with a digital print of these tombstones, and the mausoleums, along with González's 2007-09 work Anonymous Auras, have recently been designated as national heritage and secured as a site for remembrance. Anonymous Auras may be her best work in terms of succinctness and effect, representing the inexorable culmination of her artistic journey. What a forceful and generative artist she was, living through such tumultuous times. Beatriz González is at the Barbican, London, from 25 February to 10 May.
