Beatriz Gonzalez obituary | art

In the middle of Bogotá’s Central Cemetery stands the columbarium, built in 1943 to house the bodies of the poor and unknown. After it had been abandoned and neglected, Colombian artist Beatriz Gonzalez, who has died aged 93, transformed the deteriorating shrine in 2009. On each of the 8,957 tombstones, she silkscreened one of eight shaded ornaments, each featuring two figures pulling a body between them. Auras Anónimas (Anonymous Auras) is González’s poignant memorial to the unsung victims of a century of political violence and drug wars in Colombia.

González, whose prints and paintings have raised questions about power and conflict for six decades, drew images from media, including illustrated encyclopedias, postcards, sensationalist newspapers, religious calendars and pamphlets, initially to depict the mundane and tragic events. Los Suicidas del Sisga (1965) is a group of three paintings based on newspaper photographs of a couple who died by suicide. González depicts the lovers, he wearing a hat, she wearing a veil, and holding a bouquet of flowers between them, in flat masses of color.

She told Tate magazine in 2015 that she was drawn to “the simple quality of the printed image, the simplification of facial features, almost distorted by the contrast.”

In addition to crime reports and social pages, early works were inspired by “naive scenes painted on buses, popular stamps and posters for sale in Passaje Rivas”. She was then drawn to history painting, but González was not very interested in original masterpieces, few of which she had seen in person, but in what she called “reinterpretations of global images made in the Third World,” images spread through cheap prints.

In 1970, she began painting on pieces of furniture picked up from Bogotá’s junk markets, a commentary on the taste for and obsession with Western culture among her middle-class milieu: a glossy repaint of the Mona Lisa on a mirror stand, a copy of Filippo Lippi’s 15th-century Madonna and Child adorning a dresser. In 1978, as Colombia’s representative at the Venice Biennale, she took to Italy a painted version of Édouard Manet’s 1863 Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe painted on a wide curtain, titled Telón de la Móvil y Cambiante Naturaleza (Background of Moving and Changing Nature), the first of several works on a symmetrical canvas.

González’s work took a more clearly political turn in the 1980s, especially after the leftist guerrilla group M-19 laid siege to the Palace of Justice in Bogotá in 1985, killing nearly a hundred people. This event became the subject of Señor Presidente, Qué Honor Estar Con Usted en Este Momento Histórico (1987), a pair of paintings based on a newspaper photograph of the then president, Belisario Betancur, and aides gathered around a ceremonial bouquet, although in one of the two works the flowers are replaced by what appears to be a charred corpse. “It was as if the veil had been lifted,” she said of the siege. “It has radically changed this aspect of my work.”

Images of mourning and drowning are prevalent in her works, although the color palette remains bright. She said about her color choices: “Shocking and inconsistent.” The 1997 oil on canvas painting Autorretrato Desnuda Llorando (Nude Self-Portrait, Crying) shows the artist with blue skin covering her face and hands in pain. “News is temporary; in a way, the artist’s job is to not let death and pain be forgotten,” Gonzalez explained.

She was born in Bucaramanga, northern Colombia, the daughter of Clementina Aranda Mantilla and Valentin González Rangel, a local liberal politician. She left high school in 1951 and enrolled in the architecture program at the National University of Colombia in Bogotá, but interrupted her studies to travel to Europe. She returned to her native city in 1955, and worked as a window designer until she resumed her education, this time in art, at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, from which she graduated in 1962.

Success in her paintings came quickly and she had her first solo exhibition two years later at the Museo de Arte Moderna de Bogotá. In 1964 she married the architect Urbano Ripoll. “My father was rich, and he never pressured me to sell my work. Then my husband, who was very poor, never pressured me to sell my work. It gave me a lot of freedom. I could create without caring whether my work was commercial or popular.” In 1971 she represented Colombia at the São Paulo Biennale.

From 1989 to 2004 she was chief curator at the National Museum of Colombia, but continues to show her own work in international exhibitions. In 1994, the Museum of Fine Arts of Caracas mounted a retrospective exhibition, followed by a second exhibition at the Museo del Barrio, New York, in 1998.

It was included in the 2014 Berlin Biennale and in The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern in 2015. The past decade has seen its canonization in art history accelerate, with retrospective exhibitions at the KW Institute in Berlin, the Reina Sofía in Madrid in 2018, and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami in 2019. A retrospective will open at the Barbican Art Gallery in London next month, traveling from the Pinacoteca in São Paulo.

Urbano died in 2024. Beatrice is survived by their son, Daniel, and two grandchildren, Antonio and Valentina.