{"id":543478,"date":"2026-04-21T20:55:15","date_gmt":"2026-04-21T20:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/543478\/"},"modified":"2026-04-21T20:55:15","modified_gmt":"2026-04-21T20:55:15","slug":"beatriz-gonzalez-at-the-barbican-shows-artists-playfulness-wit-and-rage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/543478\/","title":{"rendered":"Beatriz Gonz\u00e1lez at the Barbican shows artist\u2019s playfulness, wit and rage"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beatriz Gonz\u00e1lez (1932-2026) possessed a gift for colour and composition, but what makes her work remarkable is the playfulness, wit and rage with which she upbraided Colombia\u2019s corrupt politicians, and her affection and compassion for those at the sharp end of their violent regimes.<\/p>\n

Six decades\u2019 worth of her paintings, drawings, sculptures, furniture, textiles and monumental public installations can now be fully appreciated in Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019 biggest European retrospective and first UK solo show at the Barbican Centre.<\/p>\n

This sadly posthumous celebration (the artist died two months before the opening) is helped immeasurably by Unknown Works\u2019 exhibition design. Its scale, subtlety and materiality provide a contemplative backdrop to offset Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s dazzling chromatic, thematic and material inventions.<\/p>\n

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Unknown Works chose paper as the primary material, in homage to Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s love of found newspaper imagery and cheap print reproductions and their influence on her storytelling and graphic style. They experimented with a 100 per cent paper, recycled and recyclable panel product, called Honext, calling the resulting spatial and material narrative \u2018paper-tecture\u2019. It appears in huge, slender sheets, which drape from the Barbican\u2019s pale, coffered ceiling to the floor. It frames the staircase as a glowing portal and elsewhere veils the scabbled concrete of the gallery walls. For seating, stacked Honext panels are compressed into elegant benches, sanded and varnished for a gently reflective surface.<\/p>\n

Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019s 150 artworks are arranged chronologically. Upstairs we start with the art that helped establish her name: seminal paintings by Johannes Vermeer and Diego Vel\u00e1zquez are translated into pulsating planes of colour and light, achieving new perspectives, new atmospheres. With Encajera foto invers\u00e9e (Lacemaker Inverted Photo, 1964) she renders the figure of Vermeer\u2019s Lacemaker into glowing blocks of saturated colour, emphasising the substance or even essence of the sitter, a panegyric to quiet, female domestic labour.<\/p>\n

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However, rejecting the conventional path of \u2018a lady who paints\u2019, Gonz\u00e1lez took to memorialising the everyday and the overlooked, from gruesome true crime stories printed in daily newspapers to the gurning and gladhanding of national and international figures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But there is affection for her fellow Colombians, too, when she mirrors in prints, paintings and enamelwork on furniture the endlessly reproduced kitsch imagery \u2013 from adverts to celebrities or religious iconography \u2013 that proliferated on the streets and in their homes. Never did she accept the term \u2018pop art\u2019 for these works. They are more acerbic; note her seemingly innocuous portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, with the gleeful title: Goodbye Africa (dated 1968, as Britain\u2019s grip on its colonial outposts was weakening).<\/p>\n

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Death and loss are dominant themes for this show, and Gonz\u00e1lez foregrounds violence against women in particular. One pivotal trio of paintings, Los suicidas del Sisga (The Sisga Suicides, 1965) was inspired by newspapers\u2019 tasteless use of a romantic studio portrait to illustrate the double suicide by drowning of a young couple (the male partner apparently wished to sacrifice himself and his future wife to \u2018preserve her purity\u2019). Painted in flattened and somewhat sickly colours, these are presented in their own cellular space, against midnight blue walls.<\/p>\n

Here, and at other strategic points, the architects make impactful use of colours taken from Gonz\u00e1lez\u2019 signature palette. Further on, deep teal walls offset haunting textile works, each featuring the sprawled figure of a murdered woman on her bed \u2013 the image taken from newspaper photographs \u2013 lovingly arranged against salvaged floral carpets and rugs. Unknown Works founding director Theo Games Petrohilos says: \u2018You need to mark these points of intimacy within the large gallery space, signifying those touch points that are significant.\u2019\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Early in her career, Gonz\u00e1lez started appropriating furniture as a canvas, triggered by a serendipitous trip to a salvage yard with her architect husband. Finding tin furniture a perfect canvas for bright enamel, she reproduces her favourite icons in unearthly tones, across beds, tables (one featuring a Leonardo-esque \u2018last supper\u2019) and, my personal favourite, a coat stand with a copy of the Mona Lisa where the mirror would normally be.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Further furniture works and sculptures are arranged like aspirational room sets downstairs, framed by monumental textile installations. The most impactful intervention lands just before the exit. A Posteriori (2022) comprises a room lined with wallpaper that replicates the Auras An\u00f3nimas (Anonymous Auras, 2007-9) action, when Gonz\u00e1lez plugged the 8,956 funerary niches of Bogot\u00e1\u2019s Central Cemetery with images of cargueros \u2013 porters who carry the dead \u2013 to honour victims of conflict.<\/p>\n

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A wall quote from Gonz\u00e1lez states: \u2018Representing violence is complex. I do it as a way to preserve memory.\u2019 Thanks to her work and this presentation, it is achieved with clarity, depth and grace.<\/p>\n

Beatriz Gonz\u00e1lez runs at the Barbican Art Gallery<\/a> until 10 May 2026<\/p>\n

Veronica Simpson is a freelance writer on design, art and architecture\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Beatriz Gonz\u00e1lez (1932-2026) possessed a gift for colour and composition, but what makes her work remarkable is the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":543479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[6225,6485,6486,187209,187210,1120,96,8798,56,54,55,54694],"class_list":{"0":"post-543478","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-barbican-art-gallery","12":"tag-beatriz-gonzalez","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment","15":"tag-exhibition","16":"tag-uk","17":"tag-united-kingdom","18":"tag-unitedkingdom","19":"tag-unknown-works"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=543478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/543478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/543479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=543478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=543478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=543478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}