With vibrant palettes and tenderly drawn lines, it’s clear why the late artist Beatriz González was known as “la maestra” in her native Colombia. A book about her groundbreaking influence on Latin American art is forthcoming, alongside a retrospective opening at the Barbican this month, spanning six decades of painting, sculpture, and mixed media “interventions” on everyday items such as furniture and wallpaper.
Her affecting oeuvre uses humour and critique to hold up a mirror to social constructs about taste, all while laying bare the ongoing legacies of colonialism by way of found images from the western canon and tattered newspaper clippings focusing on power and conflict. As González noted: “Art says things that history cannot.”
