Beatriz González: “La imagen en tránsito” (The Image in Transit)

With color, press images, everyday objects, and a sense of humor as subtle as it is critical, Beatriz González returns to São Paulo. The exhibition, entitled “La imagen en tránsito” (The Image in Transit) and curated by art historians Pollyana Quintella and Natalia Gutiérrez, brings together the different thematic and material stages that the artist has gone through throughout her career. This is a unique opportunity to discover her work, which has not been seen in this city for more than forty years, since her participation in the 11th São Paulo Biennial in 1971.

The first group of works dates from the 1960s, when the artist began to use newspaper images and their printing “errors” as a creative and aesthetic stimulus. Among them is the iconic painting Los Suicidas del Sisga (The Sisga Suicides, 1965), with which González marked the beginning of her conceptual and visual style. Visitors will see this line continued in the political tone her work later took on, when she began to use press images to draw attention to political and social injustices in Colombia. The exhibition also features a group of interventions on everyday objects from 1970 to 1980, in which beds, chairs, plates, and curtains are used to question the role of art today, its reproducibility, and the tensions between the popular and the kitsch. Notable pieces include the silkscreen Decoración de interiores (Interior Decoration, 1981), in which a curtain calls into question the role of the country’s political and cultural elite, equating them with background decoration rather than active agents.

A journey through more than 60 years of work that closes with the series Pictografías privadas (2014), where traffic signs become the symbol and material chosen to draw attention to different issues in the Colombian rural context, such as forced migration and environmental disasters.

More information:

https://pinacoteca.org.br/es/programacao/exposicoes/beatriz-gonzalez/