The art of Beatriz González is drenched in light, strong colour and blood. Her sprawling, uneven retrospective reflects the turbulent politics and violence of her native Colombia, and the breadth of a body of work that addressed art history and popular culture, provincialism and universality. At times she is as biting as a cartoonist, depicting generals as a row of anonymous blank-faced parrots. “I did not want to be a lady who paints,” she once said. Born in the provincial town of Bucaramanga in 1932, González died this January in Bogotá, shortly before the current exhibition travelled to the Barbican from the Pinacoteca in São Paolo. She was 93.
González’s show is compelling. It is also, at times, difficult to bear. She didn’t get going as a painter until her 30s, beginning with loose transcriptions and variations on Diego Velázquez’s 1634-35 The Surrender of Breda (all big-hatted Spaniards and Dutchmen, as the city behind them goes up in flames), and Vermeer’s 1669-70 The Lacemaker. Attentive to her task, perhaps Vermeer’s subject is a stand-in for the young Colombian painter herself. Soon she began flattening the forms and dialling up the temperature, making the paintings her own. She teetered, but never became an abstractionist. Her exposure to European art had been limited (although she had travelled to Europe and New York) and most of her knowledge came from reproductions, often of poor quality.
