Press room

The Barbican presents a major retrospective of groundbreaking Colombian artist, curator, art historian and educator Beatriz González (1932–2026, Colombia), her first solo show in the UK and her largest-ever exhibition in Europe. Bringing together six decades of González’s work – from the 1960s to the present – this exhibition celebrates the artist’s extraordinary and dynamic practice. Through paintings, sculptural assemblages and monumental public installations, she persistently engaged with how images permeate the world and radically reimagined what art can tell us about power, grief and memory. 

Known as ‘la maestra’ in Colombia, González’s singular vision has influenced generations of artists and thinkers. Her striking body of work speaks to experiences of conflict, communion and everything in between and this retrospective, while situating González’s practice within the specific history of Colombia and its wider Latin American context, reveals how profoundly her practice resonates with global concerns.

Featuring over 150 artworks, many of which have never been shown in the UK, this exhibition demonstrates how, through her experiments with myriad media, González consistently refused the hierarchies of value ascribed to specific mediums or cultures. Works on display span paintings, sculptural objects and interventions on furniture – beds, tables, trays, TVs and jewellery boxes; as well as monumental printed curtains, painted backdrops and immersive wallpaper installations. 

González drew from found images that she collected throughout her life in Colombia – ranging from tattered reproductions of paintings from Western art history to newspaper clippings reporting on violent conflict and loss. She reworked and transformed these sources in a distinctive graphic style and bold colour palette. Across her practice, with satire, tenderness, and defiance, she addressed the recurring violence in Colombia, socially constructed ideas of taste and value, the legacies of colonialism, and the displacement of communities.

The exhibition is a key highlight of the Barbican’s Spring season, an ideas-led programme that finds synergies across the Centre's many artforms to explore the vital topics relating to our world, our society and ourselves. Further details of programming correlated to González’s practice will be announced soon.    

Shanay Jhaveri, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican, said: “We are delighted to present the first solo exhibition of Beatriz González in the UK, whose groundbreaking work and practice has influenced generations of artists and thinkers around the world. González’s prolific practice speaks to experiences of conflict and communion, grief and memory, and the power everyday images can hold, themes which continue to resonate with global audiences today. A highlight of our Spring season, this exhibition carries forward our commitment to platforming practices that are bold and urgently relevant.” 

Exhibition Highlights: 

The exhibition opens with a selection of González’s earliest paintings, which took works by artists such as Diego Velázquez and Johannes Vermeer as their sources, translating them into bold experiments with colour and form. The artist’s iconic early series Los suicidas del Sisga (The Sisga Suicides) (1965) reinterprets a newspaper photograph of a tragic story of a double suicide. Three vivid paintings – rarely displayed together but reunited here in a dedicated gallery – translate the monochrome image into flat planes of saturated colour. While her peers experimented with the influence of American and European abstraction, González, in a conscious act of subversion, forged a striking new figurative style.  

The exhibition includes examples of her experimental printmaking, including 1960s screenprints of famous figures such as Beethoven, the Queen of England, the Pope and Jackie Onassis Kennedy – cultural icons whose images proliferated across Colombian media. Alongside these screenprints, heliographs reproduce compositions from everyday media at the time – from photos of bodybuilders to reports of murder and crime. 

Throughout her practice González addressed ideas of value and hierarchies of taste – inspired, in part, by a fascination with the Colombian (Spanish-owned) publishing house Gráficas Molinari, whose prints depicted idealised scenes of Catholicism, motherhood and femininity often derived from European engravings and Old Master paintings or portrayed Greco-Roman mythological subjects. From 1970, González started to work with found objects and cheap, flea market furniture finds; she switched from working with oil on canvas to enamel on industrial metal sheets, incorporating mass-produced objects as ‘frames’ for her paintings. Tables, TVs, beds and dressers were transformed into what the artists called ‘interventions’. 

For example, a coat rack becomes a playful sculptural object, its mirror replaced with González’s vivid rendition of the Mona Lisa. The title of this specific work, Nací en Florencia y tenía veintiséis años cuando fue pintado mi retrato (esta frase pronunciada en voz dulce y baja) (I Was Born in Florence and I Was Twenty-Six When My Portrait Was Painted (Sentence Uttered in Low and Soft Voice)) (1974), quotes directly from a newspaper article reporting on computer experiments simulating Mona Lisa’s voice. 

González was consistently captivated by how images from Western art history infiltrated a shared consciousness in present-day Colombia. Included in the exhibition is a monumental, 12-metre-long canvas inspired by a reproduction of Edouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) (1863), which González had seen displayed in a shop window. A painted table takes a kitsch postcard of Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper (c. 1495–98) – pinned up in Colombian homes as a talisman to ward off burglars – as its source.  

Works from the 1980s onwards manifest González’s shift in tone in response to the violence in Colombia, critiquing the government’s hypocrisy and corruption. Decoración de interiores (Interior Decoration) (1981), a fragment of a 140-metre-long curtain printed with an image of then-Colombian President Julio César Turbay Ayala at a party, exposes his regime’s use of spectacle to distract from its brutality. She sold it by the metre when she exhibited the work.

After 1985, González’s artistic tone switched distinctively from satirical critique to a practice of bearing witness to violence. In works such as Entierro en el Museo Nacional (Burial at the National Museum) (1991), she began collaging images from different news sources into surreal, almost mythical, scenes of violence, rendered in an uncanny colour palette - sickly greens, luminous yellows, and glowing blues. 

Increasingly preoccupied with the victims of violence and those left behind, her extensive series Las Delicias (1996–8) features compositions based on images of weeping women published in newspapers. The final work in the series, Autorretrato desnuda llorando (Nude Self-portrait, Crying), is a rare and vulnerable self-portrait.  

A series of paintings from 1992 – commissioned for an exhibition reflecting on the 500th anniversary of Christopher Colombus’ so-called ‘discovery’ of the Americas – take a newspaper image of an Indigenous rower in a flooded landscape as their inspiration. Rarely shown together, these enigmatic works invoke centuries-long histories of extractive power relations, rooted in colonisation and extending into the present.

González's practice took on an elegiac poeticism in the 2000s, illustrated here with the final work in the exhibition, A Posteriori (2022), an installation inspired by Auras Anónimas (Anonymous Auras) (2007–09), the artist’s major site-specific intervention at the Central Cemetery in Bogotá. She filled the 8,956 niches where victims of the conflict (many of whom remained anonymous) were formerly laid to rest with the repeated silhouettes of cargueros – porters carrying the dead. González offers a powerful public space for shared reflection and remembrance.