Retrospective 1965-2017
In Beatriz González’s work, worlds have a habit of colliding. Rural and urban, primitive and modernist, high and low art, form and function, centre and periphery: González plays at the boundaries keeping these binaries apart. Throughout her fifty-year career, the Colombian artist (born 1933) has worked to elevate the status of marginal identity to the realm of fine art; not by adhering to the latter’s principles, either, but by pushing a union between two seemingly irreducible worlds. As with an awkward translation, though, the point of fissure always remains plain to see. González’s aim is not to somehow validate the local through art, but to show the non-compliant value it already holds—on its own terms.
Produced in collaboration with the CAPC (Centre d’Arts Plastiques Contemporains) in Bordeaux and Madrid’s Reina Sofía, and with her showcase at documenta 14 (2017) still fresh in collective memory, Retrospective 1965-2017 at Berlin’s KW Institute for Contemporary Art provides an extremely thorough and considered overview of González’s work. The largest collection of her work to date to be shown outside of Colombia, it includes 120 artworks, alongside a documentary on the artist made by the filmmaker Diego García Moreno. Arranged roughly in chronological order, a labyrinth of small rooms containing paintings, heliogravure prints, vitrines and other wall-based work leads down into a cavernous central exhibition space dedicated to sculptural and larger works. Consistent throughout this wide practice is the artist’s outspoken love for her country; and with it, a constant critique of the disconnected, wine-guzzling politicians and brutal paramilitaries that have, either consciously or unconsciously, perpetuated its barbarous recent past. In the traditional bright colours and kitsch religious iconography of her home country, González
Beatriz González, Los Suicidas del Sisga No 2, 1965. Oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist, Óscar Monsalve, and Museo La Tertulia, Cali. Collection Museo La Tertulia, Cali.
