Beatriz González
Barbican Art Gallery, London
From February 25th, unitll May 10th, 2026
The Barbican Art Gallery in London presents a major retrospective devoted to Beatriz González, a central figure in contemporary Latin American art. It marks her first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom and, at the same time, the most extensive presentation of her work ever staged in Europe. Spanning more than six decades — from the 1960s to the present — the exhibition traces the full scope of a singular artistic practice, revealing its enduring force, complexity, and relevance. Born in Colombia, González is a multifaceted figure: artist, art historian, curator, and educator. In her home country she is known as la maestra, not only for the profound influence she has had on generations of artists, but for the clarity with which she has examined the relationship between images, power and memory. “Art says things that history cannot”, she states — a conviction that runs through the entire exhibition and forms its conceptual core. Featuring over 150 works, many of which have never been shown in the UK, the retrospective brings into focus a visual language that disregards hierarchies and boundaries between high and low, between fine art and popular culture. Paintings, sculptural assemblages, interventions on furniture, and monumental installations coexist within a dense, layered visual narrative.
“Art says things that history cannot.”
Everything becomes a potential narrative surface, capable of absorbing and transforming images drawn from Western art history, mass media, and the news. The exhibition opens with González’s early works from the 1960s, in which she reinterprets paintings by artists such as Velázquez and Vermeer through flat fields of colour and bold chromatic choices. At a time when abstraction dominated the art world, González made a conscious commitment to figuration, this is a strong statement. A key example is the series Los suicidas del Sisga (1965), based on a newspaper photograph of a tragic event.
Translated into saturated colour, the image sheds all sensationalism, becoming an intimate meditation on loss and grief. Alongside painting, the exhibition highlights González’s graphic and serial experiments. Screenprints depicting media icons such as the Queen of England, Beethoven, or Jackie Kennedy sit alongside images drawn from popular press, where the everyday and the tragic coexist without mediation. As the exhibition unfolds, it becomes clear how González’s work increasingly engages, with growing urgency, with the Colombian context in which she lived and worked. Painterly collages constructed from press images evoke collective mourning, absent bodies, and wounded communities. Series such as Las Delicias (1996–8) give a face to those left behind, culminating in a rare, disarming self-portrait marked by vulnerability. The exhibition concludes with more recent works, where an elegiac tone opens onto a space of shared remembrance and reflection. Co-produced with the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, the Barbican exhibition stands as a central highlight of the London venue’s Spring season — a rare opportunity to encounter a body of work that, while rooted in a specific history, speaks with universal resonance.
For further information Barbican.org.uk.
