As her first UK retrospective opens at the Barbican next week, we revisit Mark Rappolt’s 2016 conversation with one of Colombia’s most influential artists (1932–2026)
Beatriz González is a Colombian artist who was among the first to draw inspiration and content from mass-media sources and was considered to be one of Latin America’s leading Pop artists. Having reached adulthood during the period of ‘La Violencia’ (a ten-year period of civil war in the country, 1948–58), González’s work has often displayed her interest in the fates of ordinary people and local cultures. Today she is among the most influential living artists in Colombia.
Gonzalez’s first solo exhibition took place at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá in 1964, and her work is now in the collections of MoMA, New York, Tate Modern, London and other museums around the world.
ArtReview Which were the artists (or other things) that influenced you at the beginning of your career? And why did you decide to become an artist?
Beatriz González At the beginning of my career, Picasso and Degas. In college, it was my painting professor, Juan Antonio Roda, and Fernando Botero, who was just rising up in the early 1960s. My family, teachers and classmates in primary school saw talent in me; however, when choosing a profession, I didn’t initially think of art but rather architecture, maths or photography. Even when I started going to art school at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, I thought of switching to philosophy. In fact, in parallel to fine art, I also studied metaphysics for six semesters. It was only during my third year, when they gave me, alongside three other students, an atelier, that I felt the will to become an artist. It had to do with the competition.
AR Was it politics (the era of La Violencia) more than other artists that shaped your work? And do you consider your work to be political?
BG I don’t think that period marked my work in terms of politics. All my life – except during my childhood and adolescence – I’ve been a witness to the country’s violence, so I don’t think it has to do with that. It’s been the critique of power that has impregnated my work. For that same reason, I don’t think of it as ‘political’; it just has a commitment to ethics.
AR Do you think of yourself as someone whose work records the history of your country? (I’m thinking of work such as Mr. President, What an Honor to be With You at This Historic Moment, but also Auras Anónimas [both 2009].)
BG Without me seeking it, my work has turned into a recollection of the country’s historical events. Someone once said that ‘art tells that which history is unable to’.
AR Thinking more of Auras Anónimas, in which you stencilled 8,957 silhouetted images of victims of violence, sourced from newspaper photographs, on the coffin spaces of a disused crypt, once the burial place of the anonymous poor, how did the project come about and do you think that art has an important role to play in the field of collective memory? And how does a project like that differ in process to creating a painting or series of paintings on canvas for a gallery?
BG Auras Anónimas was conceived as part of a programme influenced by the theory of the ‘counter-monument’. For that reason, it was a work that was supposed to last only for two years; nonetheless it has been there since 2009. What happened? Well, little by little it became a symbol, an icon, and has gotten to symbolise the memory of the victims of a violence that has dominated the country for over 50 years. When I try to look in retrospect at my pictorial work, I find the inclusion of various objects, many of them objets trouvés, that I intervene with painting, so I find similarities in this case. Just as if the abandoned cemetery was a found object.
AR Is being an artist a gift or a responsibility?
BG First, it is a gift. A talent you are born with that develops in the right conditions. When it develops it turns into a responsibility.
AR What does it mean for an artist to transform a photograph into a painting? (I’m thinking of the Sisga Suicides [1965], or your works that use images from print media.) What does the painting do that the photograph does not?
BG Photography takes the place of the model in academia. I think that photography’s particularity lies in its ephemeral quality, while the essence of painting lies in its endurance. In the source photography for The Suicides of El Sisga I found what I was looking for and I took the elements I needed, while others I discarded. In photography it is very difficult to discard elements, unless you alter the photo or decide to intervene in it.
AR Your work is currently in a show about Pop art at Tate Modern, and you’re often described as being a Pop artist. What does ‘Pop art’ mean to you, and is it something you feel a part of?
BG I have never considered myself as a Pop artist. I didn’t know the work of those artists, because in Colombia there was very little information available, and when the information arrived I didn’t understand it and it didn’t attract me. Nonetheless, my work from the 1960s has a few coincidences, among them my attraction to poorly printed photographs, publicity ads, works of art reproduced for mass consumption, etc. But it also never crossed my mind that I was the ‘local Warhol’. Pop must have been in the air, because I started to be labelled as Pop. I was in the middle of something else, I was interested in the subject of taste, even in the philosophical sense of the word. When I was invited to the Tate show, I clarified my feelings, but I was also very honoured to show my work there.
AR Did you feel that you were ever having to fight academic conventions that placed European-style painting as a ‘higher art’ than the kind of work that appeared in more everyday culture? You’ve worked a lot with iconic European paintings in a manner that seems to be at once homage and a process of assimilation into a different culture…
BG I wasn’t trying to make a homage, like Botero and other artists were. I had a theory, just as I presented at the 1978 Venice Biennale: ‘the transformations that the work of art endures in underdeveloped countries’. That is, the way in which images arrive; such exquisite icons as Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace [1662–4] are presented here [in Colombia] in a bulletin on sexual education; reproductions of Leonardo’s The Last Supper [1495–8] are placed in houses as a protection against thieves.
AR How much of an impact did Marta Traba have on your career? She seemed to be a key figure when I visited Colombia, and I wonder today whether or not an art critic could have such an influence?
BG Marta lived in Colombia for 16 years. From all of the countries she lived and worked in, Colombia was perhaps the one in which she was the most influential. She defined the work of different generations because she found that people didn’t know contemporary art that much. As a critic she was combative, she initiated institutions like the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and was a teacher to many. She was my art history professor in college and she supported me as an artist during all of her life.
AR You’ve been described as one of the ‘founders’ of Colombian art. What makes Colombian art different from the art produced in other countries in Latin America? Is the very idea of a country-specific art an outdated one in a world in which communication is supposed to be seamless and every experience is a shared one?
BG I don’t think I’m a founder. The development of Colombian art, as in the rest of the countries in Latin America, has its particularities, its stages and influences: in Colombia academia arrived late, 1873, and for that reason we were dependent on travellers. Marta Traba attacked the influence of Mexican Muralism and nationalist art, she exalted artists who were showing contemporaneity. Now, globalisation makes it impossible to establish ghettos or borders. Latin American art is an entelechy.
AR Do you think your art is received differently by audiences in Colombia than it is by audiences in the rest of the world?
BG I once said my work wasn’t well received in Europe. I thought if it was received it was maybe like something curious, a curiosity. Now it doesn’t matter, I’ve seen it at Tate, at MoMA, in the words of European and American critics.
AR Did becoming a teacher of other artists influence the development of your own work?
BG As a pedagogue specialised in art, I’ve had influence on a few artists; like María Inés Rodríguez [the Colombian director of CAPC
Bordeaux] says, I have the gift of transmitting knowledge. As far as my influence in other generations, they are the ones to say.
AR What have been the biggest changes for you as an artist since you first began your career?
BG There are major differences: when I painted The Suicides of El Sisga, back when my work revolved around taste, I assembled a painting with a metal support. That had a profound impact, as I started the furniture pieces; when I stopped making versions of universal works of art and turned to observing power in ruling classes (Zócalo de la Comedia, 1983, and Zócalo de la Tragedia, 1983); when, due to the sorrow brought by the holocaust of the Palace of Justice siege [a 1985 attack against the Supreme Court of Colombia by members of the M-19 guerrilla group who held the Supreme Court hostage; after a con-
troversial military counter-raid, 11 of the 25 Supreme Court Justices were left dead, alongside 48 Colombian soldiers and 35 members of M-19; 10 other people are ‘missing’], I found the death caused by narcos (Las Delicias, 1997); or when I found I could turn images into icons or signs.
From ArtReview January & February 2016 – get your copy.
Beatriz González is at the Barbican, London, 25 February through 10 May.
Read more Berenice Olmedo’s Transhuman Futures
