A current of kitsch vibrates through the work of Beatriz González. The Colombian artist, who is best known internationally for her paintings that subvert the canon of historical European art, saw no need to adhere to the accepted hierarchy of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. Instead, she looked to the vernacular objects and imagery treasured by everyday people, producing sculptural ‘ready-mades’ from mass-produced furniture and oftentimes installing completed works within her home, so that she might live with the work she created.
Among the most famous is a polished wood coat rack emblazoned with a pop-art rendition of the Mona Lisa, in which the mysterious model’s delicate features have been dramatically stylised in flat planes of orange and umber, thus replacing the space where a mirror was once fixed. It lived in her Bogotá apartment for decades, although eventually it was only the artist herself who was allowed to hang both jacket and handbag from its hooks.
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The piece features a rather long-winded title: I Was Born in Florence and I Was Twenty-Six Years Old When My Portrait Was Painted (Sentence Uttered in a Low, Soft Voice) (1974). This phrase alludes to the secondary source material that served as inspiration. The artist looked not to the master work that hangs in the Louvre, but a newspaper cutting proclaiming that a group of scientists had simulated what the famous sitter’s voice might have sounded like, based on the visual data gleaned from the canvas.
‘The title is very witty,’ says Lotte Johnson, curator of a major retrospective at the Barbican in London, which opened shortly after González’s death. ‘She plays with the very gendered sensuality of the headline, and imagines what this young woman might have said,’ she adds.
These ‘interventions’, as the artist called them, are all about examining the ways that European iconography has been transformed by Latin American culture. She was intrigued by cheaply printed reproductions that might feature garish colours and blurred lines, but still found their place in homes as potent symbols of veneration. She was particularly fascinated by Gráficas Molinari, a Spanish-owned publishing house that specialised in Catholic motifs, and subjects of motherhood and femininity. ‘She is interested in why these images become popular,’ says Johnson, ‘but she is also bringing them off their pedestal and engaging with them on a domestic level, with playfulness and humour.’
Within this exhibition, there are installations that appear like uncanny living spaces, where a dressing table or metal bed frame might be adorned with Renaissance pictures. Of the latter objects, one might assume that the wood-effect patterns were applied by the artist, but they were actually manufactured in this manner to manifest a notion of luxury, with final flourishes added by individual craftsmen.
This connection to the individual hand (one that is anonymous and largely unappreciated) plays into wider facets of González’s practice. She lived through a period known as La Violenica, where extreme political unrest and government oppression meant that an artist’s work was often under scrutiny for signs of dissidence. Materials and objects associated with domestic space and the ‘applied arts’ were often dismissed as nothing more than harmless decoration, meaning that González was able to infuse her work with critical messaging, while going widely undetected.
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This is most evident in Interior Decoration (1981) a cannily titled curtain printed with a publicity photograph of President Julio César Turbay Ayala, who feted the media and built a cult of personality as political unrest and armed conflict raged on. When exhibited Gonzàlez sold the textile by the metre, cutting it onsite in a pointed allusion to both a physical undercutting of the art world, and the president’s financial ties.
‘It’s this symbolic gesture revealing his hypocrisy as a leader,’ says Johnson, ‘and this disjunction between his frivolity and the brutality that he’s perpetuating.’ When questioned about the work by undercover police, she had a simple answer: ‘I’m just reproducing an image sanctioned by the president himself.’
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This razor-thin line was a dangerous one to walk, yet González continued to push the parameters of such unassuming objects and the imagery that surrounded her. She satirised Turbay’s presidential address by applying his image to the screen of a TV set (he orchestrated the introduction of colour television into the country) and later began to turn her eye to more distressing imagery.
In a series of bedspreads, depictions of violence are hewn among delicate floral patterns, alluding to the brutal realities of Colombian life. Even when surrounded by talismans of protection and the comforts of domesticity, violence often permeated the perceived sanctuary of home.
‘Beatriz González’ runs at the Barbican Art Gallery until 10 May 2026. For more information visit barbican.org
