The Artsy Vanguard 2019: Beatriz González
Beatriz González. Courtesy of the artist.
At 80 years old, painter and sculptor Beatriz González has been called one of the founders of modern Colombian art, but her international profile has grown in the past few years. Originally a figurative painter, González changed styles in the 1960s, creating vivid, colorblocked compositions based on mass media. In 1965, her painting The Suicides of the Sisga I, II and III was refused by the jury of the Salon of Colombian Artists. The artist has often dealt with violent unrest in her work, having come of age during a bloody era of Colombian history known as La Violencia.
In 2017, the artist was included in the survey “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” which had stops at the Hammer Museum and the Brooklyn Museum, as well as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo. Last year, she debuted solo shows at the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. The Shed in New York recently screened a new documentary film about González, and this fall, her first major retrospective in the U.S. will arrive at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, after debuting at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in April. González shows with Casas Riegner and Galerie Peter Kilchmann.
Installation view of “Beatriz González”at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Palacio Velazquez, Madrid, Spain, 2018. Photo by Joaquín Cortés / Román Lores. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich.
MFA Houston curator Mari Carmen Ramírez pointed to González’s later works in the 1980s, when the artist turned her eye to the trauma of her home country’s ongoing conflict. “Coated under unpredictable colors, the harrowing images González concocts remain in our consciousness long after we have seen them,” Ramírez said.
