The Barbican presents a landmark retrospective of Colombian artist Beatriz González (1932–2026) — her first solo exhibition in the UK and the largest ever staged in Europe. Spanning more than six decades, the exhibition traces a practice that quietly but relentlessly reshaped how art can confront power, grief, memory and the circulation of images.
Widely known in Colombia as la maestra, González built a language that is at once pop, political and deeply personal. Her work absorbs the imagery of everyday life — newspaper photographs, mass-produced religious prints, reproductions of Old Masters — and returns them to the world transformed: flattened, saturated, dislocated, and charged with emotion. The result is art that feels both domestic and monumental, intimate and public.
Featuring more than 150 works, many never previously shown in the UK, the exhibition reveals an artist who refused hierarchies — between “high” and “low,” art and object, beauty and kitsch, history and daily life. Paintings sit alongside sculptural interventions on furniture, enamel works on industrial metal, printed curtains, immersive wallpaper environments and large-scale installations. Beds, tables, televisions and jewellery boxes become carriers of memory; private interiors become political stages.
González worked from a lifelong archive of found imagery gathered across Colombia — tattered art reproductions, media photographs, devotional pictures, crime reports. These sources were never simply quoted. Instead, she translated them into a distinctive visual vocabulary of bold colour, graphic simplification and subtle distortion. Satire, tenderness and defiance coexist. Violence is present, but so is care.
From Old Masters to Mass Media
The exhibition opens with González’s early paintings of the 1960s, in which she reinterpreted canonical works by artists such as Velázquez and Vermeer through a deliberately flattened, chromatic lens. Rather than emulate European modernism, she carved out a figurative approach that felt pointedly local and quietly subversive.
Her iconic series Los suicidas del Sisga (1965) transforms a newspaper photograph of a tragic double suicide into three stark paintings of saturated colour. The shift from grainy reportage to luminous surface turns a specific event into something mythic, unsettling and strangely beautiful.
Printmaking experiments from the same period reproduce mass-circulated images of global figures — Beethoven, the Pope, Jackie Kennedy — revealing how celebrity and authority travel through reproduction. Nearby, heliographs translate everyday media imagery, from bodybuilders to crime scenes, into ambiguous cultural icons.
Furniture as Witness
By the 1970s, González began working directly with found objects, particularly inexpensive furniture sourced from flea markets. Oil on canvas gave way to enamel on metal; paintings became “interventions.” A dresser or coat rack might host a reimagined Mona Lisa, collapsing Renaissance prestige into domestic banality.
In one work, a mirror frame becomes a stage for a brightly coloured Mona Lisa accompanied by a title quoting a newspaper article about attempts to simulate her voice by computer — a wry meditation on reproduction, authorship and technological myth-making.
González was fascinated by how Western masterpieces circulated as cheap prints in Colombian homes, often functioning as talismans or decoration rather than cultural authority. A postcard version of The Last Supper, for example, becomes the basis for a painted table referencing the widespread belief that the image could ward off burglars.
Satire Gives Way to Mourning
From the 1980s onward, her tone darkens in response to escalating violence in Colombia. Political critique becomes sharper, then gradually more elegiac. A fragment of a vast printed curtain depicting President Julio César Turbay Ayala partying exposes the regime’s reliance on spectacle while repression unfolded elsewhere.
After 1985, satire recedes and witness takes precedence. González begins assembling composite scenes from news images of massacres, disappearances and mourning families. Colours become uncanny — acidic greens, glowing yellows, bruised blues — heightening the sense of dislocation.
Her series Las Delicias (1996–98), based on photographs of grieving women, confronts the aftermath of violence rather than the act itself. The final piece, a nude self-portrait in tears, introduces the artist’s own body into this landscape of loss — not as spectacle, but as solidarity.
Works addressing colonial histories also appear, including paintings derived from a newspaper image of an Indigenous rower navigating floodwaters. These quiet, enigmatic compositions gesture toward centuries of extraction and displacement.
Memory as Public Space
The exhibition culminates with González’s later installations, in which remembrance becomes collective rather than personal. A Posteriori (2022) echoes her major intervention Auras Anónimas (2007–09) at Bogotá’s Central Cemetery, where she filled thousands of burial niches with repeated silhouettes of porters carrying the dead — anonymous figures representing victims of conflict.
Here, repetition becomes ritual. Images do not merely represent memory; they perform it. The result is both devastating and oddly consoling — a visual language capable of holding grief without resolving it.
This retrospective positions González not simply as a key Latin American figure but as one of the most incisive image-makers of the last half-century. Long before the age of memes, viral photographs and algorithmic feeds, she understood how images circulate, mutate and accumulate meaning — and how they can be reclaimed as tools for empathy rather than spectacle.
At the Barbican, her work feels less like history than like a manual for reading the present.
Beatriz González , 25th February?– 10th May 2026, Barbican Art Gallery
The exhibition is co-produced by Pinacoteca de São Paulo (30th August 2025 – 1st Feb 2026) and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (12th June – 11th October 2026). At the Barbican, it is curated by Lotte Johnson (Curator), with Diego Chocano (Assistant Curator).
Exhibition design by architecture studio Unknown Works. Graphic design by Roland Brauchli.
