Beatriz González has spent six decades doing something most painters don’t attempt, and fewer still pull off, taking the images that circulate through daily life, the newspaper photograph, the Western art history textbook, the religious icon, the furniture catalogue and putting them through a process that makes them mean something they couldn’t mean before. Beatriz González is not especially well known in Europe. That is about to change.
This monograph arrives alongside her largest European retrospective to date, and it is, by any measure, a serious piece of work. More than 100 works, 300 images, edited by Lotte Johnson and Diego Chocano, rigorously researched and richly illustrated. It does what the best exhibition catalogues do — functions as both a record and an argument. The argument here is that González is not a regional figure whose work requires contextualising before it can be understood. She is a major artist whose practice speaks directly to questions that are live everywhere right now, about images and power, memory and violence, who gets to write history and what gets left out.
González trained at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá in the 1960s, where the curriculum was what you’d expect — a tightly stitched canon of European Masters, the usual colonial inheritance dressed up as universal culture. She unpicked it. Her early series The Sisga Suicides from 1965 takes a newspaper photograph of tragedy and runs it through vibrant stylisation until it becomes something else entirely, still recognisable, still rooted in a real event, but now carrying emotional and political weight the original photograph couldn’t hold. Later works, like Kennedy (John Fitzgerald) from 1971 and Interior Decoration from 1981, do similar things with furniture, wallpaper, and public space. Domestic surfaces become sites of political memory. It sounds almost gentle. It isn’t.
Running through all of it is a recurring preoccupation with Colombia’s history of violence, displacement, colonialism, and the ongoing trauma visited on Indigenous communities. González addresses this with a combination of satire, tenderness and something that might be called defiance, though the word undersells how formally precise the work is. Politics is never separate from the painting. They’re in the colour, the graphic language, the decision to extract and reinscribe rather than document.
Johnson’s introductory essay, from which excerpts are included here, centres on a sentence González has returned to throughout her career: “El arte cuenta lo que la historia no puede contar” art says things that history cannot. It’s a formulation González has repeated so often she’s almost forgotten where it came from, which is itself interesting. The idea has become inseparable from the practice. Her archive of source material, newspaper clippings, book pages, advertisements, posters, all held in folders, now stored at the Biblioteca Luis Ángel Arango in Bogotá, reflects the same impulse. Images are extracted from context, examined, and reanimated. The past, in González’s hands, is not fixed. It’s something to be picked up, turned over, brought into the present and carried forward.
Contributions from contemporary artists punctuate the chapters, which helps situate the work across generations without the book becoming purely historical. González is 83. Her influence on younger artists working with appropriation, political memory, and the afterlife of images is substantial and still largely uncharted in European critical writing. This book begins to address that.
It is, in the end, exactly the kind of monograph that makes you want to stand in front of the actual paintings. What is the best thing you can say about one?
Beatriz González, edited by Lotte Johnson and Diego Chocano, was published on 3 March 2026.
