Beatriz González, the formidable painter who redefined Latin American art through her bold “remakes” of Western masterpieces and unflinching political critiques, died on Friday at her home in Bogotá, per artnews.com.
She was 93.
Her Zurich-based representative, Galerie Peter Kilchmann, confirmed her passing but did not disclose a cause.
Born in Bucaramanga in 1932, González emerged in the 1960s as a “transgressor” who refused to fit the era’s artistic moulds. While often associated with the Pop Art movement—a label she personally disavowed—her work was uniquely Colombian. She gained early fame for her “garish” reinterpretations of works by Raphael and Da Vinci, often applying her canvases to unconventional surfaces like bed frames, vanities, and curtains.
In one of her most famous provocations, Diez Metros de Renoir (1977), she repainted a Renoir masterpiece at an expanded scale and sold it to the public by the centimetre, poking fun at the commodification of “High Art.”
The 1980s marked a “sea change” in her practice. As Colombia faced escalating civil unrest and the horrors of La Violencia, González abandoned irony for biting political commentary.
The Palace of Justice Siege, the 1985 massacre spurred a shift toward solemn, protest-minded imagery, while her 1981 work Interior Decoration depicted President Julio César Turbay Ayala at a party, a piece so controversial it drew a heightened police presence to her exhibitions.
In 2007, she filled 8,000 niches in a Bogotá cemetery with silhouettes of workers carrying corpses, creating a haunting monument to the nation’s victims of war.
Beyond the studio, González was a pillar of the Colombian art scene, serving as a curator at the National Museum and an adviser to the Banco de la República.
Though she described herself as a shy individual, her impact was explosive. Her work recently reached new heights of international acclaim, with major retrospectives at the MoMA and Tate Modern. A final touring exhibition is scheduled to open at London’s Barbican Centre this February.
As she once told the artist Amalia Pica: “When we [shy people] do want to say something, we go off like a bomb.”
•Featured image: Beatriz González/Courtesy Galerie Peter Kilchmann
