Grande Dame of Latin American painting Beatriz González depicted the political unrest in Colombia as a chronicler

In 1985, artist Beatriz González (1932–2026) and other Colombians saw with horror the tragedy that occurred in their country. A hostage situation took place in the Palace of Justice, in which President Belisario Betancur played a controversial role. He did not negotiate, the army intervened with a heavy hand, resulting in a fire and massacre. An attack on law, after which justice was systematically not delivered. González picked up her drawing materials. She drew a group at a table with Betancur in the middle, a dead body on the table, and everyone smiling as if nothing had happened. In this way she immortalized the hypocrisy in Colombian politics.

Yesterday, after an illness, González died in her hometown of Bogotá. Museum De Pont said that her family has announced the death. In October 2024, De Pont organized another retrospective exhibition of González as ‘painter of Colombian memory’. Already 91 years old at the time, she was present at the press preview where she talked about the political history of her country and how she converted it into paint. The exhibition included two meter-high monumental works that she had created the year before.

Civil war

González was born in 1932 in Bucaramanga, located in the Andes, where she grew up in troubled times. In 1948, ‘La Violencia’ began, a civil war that, after ten years, would culminate in a long guerrilla period. That shaped her views and thus her art, which she started in the 1950s. She ended her architectural studies prematurely because she preferred the visual arts. In 1962, she completed her studies at the Faculty of Arts of the Universidad de los Andes, and began exhibiting.

Her husband Urbano Ripoll (1934–2024) became an architect and together they traveled to the Netherlands in 1966, where she studied for six months at the art academy in Rotterdam. It was during that stay that she immersed herself in European art history, such as Velazquez, Vermeer, Da Vinci.

She took that frame of reference back home, where Colombian art traditions also inspired her, as well as Pop Art that she had encountered during her studies in New York. She combined all this in her own colorful visual language with which she wanted to depict the world around her. She started with her own interpretations of Colombian visual culture. She then started to paint Catholic images, Jesus and Mary, and news photos from newspapers. For all this she used the kind of enamel paint used for billboards.

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Wallpaper with human figures

Those news photos gave a bleak picture of the country, torn by the battle with FARC and drug cartels. As the violence hardened, so did her work. War, mourning and death became recurring themes. Her paintings became grim without necessarily being literal: she preferred to express pain in metaphors. For example, she designed a wallpaper showing small human figures, displaced people, who are fleeing all the violence with their household goods: it became wallpaper because you can roll it out endlessly, just as the struggle in Colombia seemed to do.

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She also underlined the anonymity of oppressed citizens with her installation Auras Anónimas in a dilapidated cemetery in Bogotá in 2009: thousands of screen-printed silhouettes of cargueros (carriers of corpses) for the cleared graves of unidentified Colombians. It was an indictment and tribute to the anonymous victims, because without a face they and their tragedy are forgotten. Art can help against forgetfulness. For this work she received the International Award for Public Art 2024 from the University of Shanghai.

She had meanwhile acquired international fame, after being best known last century, mainly in South America. In 1998 she had a solo exhibition at El Museo del Barrio in New York, and more exhibitions followed in the US, Mexico and Europe in the 1910s. In 2014 her work was shown at the Berlin Biennale, in 2017 at the Documenta in Kassel and Athens, in 2017 at the Venice Biennale. Relatively late, with even more plans ahead: she also had many invitations to Europe for last year and 2026. She talked about that late European appreciation in an interview with NRC in September 2024: “Maybe they weren’t ready for it yet and now they are?”

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