In the middle of Bogotá’s Central Cemetery stands the columbarium, built in 1943 to house the bodies of poor and unidentified people. Abandoned and neglected, in 2009 the decaying mausoleum was transformed by the Colombian artist Beatriz González, who has died aged 93. On each of the 8,957 tombstones, she had silkscreened one of eight silhouetted motifs, each featuring two figures hauling a body between them. Auras Anónimas (Anonymous Auras) is González’s haunting memorial to the nameless victims of Colombia’s near century of political violence and drugs wars.
González, whose prints and paintings mined questions of power and conflict for six decades, appropriated imagery from mass media, including pictorial encyclopaedias, postcards, sensationalist newspapers, religious calendars and pamphlets, initially to portray events both humdrum and tragic. Los Suicidas del Sisga (1965) is a suite of three paintings based on newspaper photographs of a couple who died by suicide. González renders the lovers, he in a hat, she in a headscarf, clutching a bouquet of flowers between them, in flat blocks of colour.
She was attracted, she told the Tate in 2015, by “the plain quality of the printed image, the simplification of the facial features, almost deformed by the discrepancy”.
As well as crime reports and the social pages, early works took inspiration from “naive scenes painted on buses, popular stamps and stickers for sale at the Pasaje Rivas”. She then gravitated to historical painting, but González was not so interested in the original masterpieces, few of which she had seen in person, but what she called the “reinterpretations of universal images that were made in the third world”, the images proliferated through cheap prints.
In 1970 she started to paint on items of furniture picked up from Bogotá’s junk markets, a commentary on taste and the fetishisation of western culture among her middle-class milieu: a lurid Mona Lisa repainted on to a mirror stand, a version of Filippo Lippi’s 15th-century Madonna and Child adorning a dresser. In 1978, as Colombia’s representative at the Venice biennale, she took to Italy a kitschy copy of Édouard Manet’s 1863 Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe painted on a vast curtain, entitled Telón de la Móvil y Cambiante Naturaleza (Backdrop of a Moving and Changing Nature), the first of several works on concertinaed fabric.
González’s work took a more overtly political turn in the 1980s, especially after the leftist M-19 guerrilla group staged a siege at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá in 1985, resulting in nearly a hundred dead. That event became the subject of Señor Presidente, Qué Honor Estar Con Usted en Este Momento Histórico (1987), a pair of paintings based on a press photograph of the then-president, Belisario Betancur, and aides crowded around a ceremonial bouquet, though in one of the two works the flowers have been replaced with what appears to be a charred corpse. “It was as though a veil had been lifted,” she said of the siege. “It radically altered that whole aspect of my work.”
Images of mourning and drowning proliferated her work, though the palette remained bright. “Shocking and out of tune,” she said of her colour choices. The 1997 oil on canvas Autorretrato Desnuda Llorando (Self-portrait Nude, Crying), shows the artist with blue skin covering her face with her hands in anguish. González explained: “The news is temporary; in a way, the artist’s job is not to allow death and pain to be forgotten.”
Born in Bucaramanga, in the north of Colombia, she was the daughter of Clementina Aranda Mantilla and Valentín González Rangel, a local liberal politician. Leaving high school in 1951, she enrolled on to the architecture programme at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, but cut her studies short to travel in Europe. Returning to her home city in 1955, she worked as a window dresser until resuming her education, this time in art, at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, graduating in 1962.
Success with her paintings came quickly and she had her first solo exhibition two years later, at Museo de Arte Moderna de Bogotá. In 1964 she married the architect Urbano Ripoll. “My father was well-to-do, and he never pressured me to sell my work. Then my husband, who was very poor, also never pressed me to sell my work. That gave me a lot of freedom. I could create without caring if my work was commercial or popular.” In 1971 she represented Colombia at the São Paulo biennale.
From 1989 to 2004 she was chief curator at the Museo Nacional de Colombia, but continued to exhibit her own work at galleries internationally. In 1994 the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas held a retrospective, followed by a second at the Museo del Barrio, New York, in 1998.
She was included in the 2014 Berlin biennale and in The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern in 2015. The last decade has seen her canonisation into art history accelerate, with retrospectives at the KW Institute, Berlin, and the Reina Sofía, Madrid, in 2018, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2019. A retrospective at the Barbican Art Gallery in London opens next month, travelling from Pinacoteca in São Paulo.
Urbano died in 2024. Beatriz is survived by their son, Daniel, and two grandchildren, Antonio and Valentina.
• Beatriz González, artist, born 16 November 1932; died 9 January 2026
