González retrospective brings exposure to an important Latin American voice
Beatriz González might not be keen on the idea, but museum visitors considering her work for the first time could see her as a Latin American Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns or Robert Rauschenberg.
Like those icons of contemporary art, she has been appropriating mass-media images as painting subjects, and thinking and rethinking them in unique ways, since 1965.
That’s emphasized in “Beatriz González: A Retrospective,” opening Sunday at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Vitrines within the galleries hold the yellowing newspaper and magazine clippings and popular, mass-produced prints she has collected for years as source material.
Unfolding chronologically across the long expanse of the Upper Brown Pavilion, this is the first U.S. career retrospective for González. Co-curated by the MFAH’s Mari Carmen Ramírez and Tobias Ostrander, the show opened earlier this year at the Pérez Art Museum Miami and also will travel to Bogotá, Colombia.
It’s a big deal, and just the latest in a string of recent international exhibitions that have brought González into the limelight late in life — 60 years into her career, at age 80. While famous in her native Colombia, she has referred to herself as “a provincial artist” for decades.
Ramírez has offered glimpses of González’s work since the landmark “Inverted Utopias” show 15 years ago. But the sprawling retrospective is an eye-opener, and yet another correction to the annals of maledominated art history.
“There’s a lot more to her work than meets the eye,” Ramírez says. “Her work really stands at a crossing point between Modernism and Post-Modernism. … She anticipates a number of strategies that contemporary artists are still using today.”
González belongs to a generation of tenacious, post-war Latin Americans who set out to redefine the parameters of painting in the 1960s. Early on, she reinterpreted Old Masters, deconstructing Diego Velázquez’s early-17th-century masterpiece “The Surrender of Breda” and Johannes Vermeer’s “The Lacemaker” into expressionistic canvases that look almost abstract.
But abstraction wasn’t her thing. More in tune with artists such as Fernando Botero, she was looking for original ways to make figurative art progressive.
Her breakthrough came with a series of paintings inspired by a picture she clipped from a newspaper; a formal-looking portrait depictng a young couple before they committed suicide by jumping off a dam as an act of love. The sensational story couldn’t have hurt, but what grabbed González was the flat,
over-lit quality of the image itself.
The canvases “Los suicides del sisga” I, II and III hang just inside the second gallery, showing how González played with the image, engaging with that flatness and also tinkering with the framing of the image and varying the strong, contrasting colors of her eccentric palette.
Those paintings also led González to question notions of good taste and culture in Colombian society, and she began making works based on photographs of celebrities, widely distributed prints published by the Spaniard Antonio Molinari and reproductions of iconic paintings that had become ubiquitous home décor.
Furniture became a signature framing device after she happened upon a cheap but fancy bed, brought it home and realized a painting she had made on aluminum fit neatly into the base. The show’s central gallery contains a great selection of kitschy furniture pieces that incorporate González’s simplified riffs on Western art masterpieces such as da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” and “The Last Supper.” A monumental acrylic screen copied from Édouard Manet’s “The Luncheon on the Grass” dominates the room; González made it in 1978 after seeing the image reproduced on the cover of a cookbook.
Her works from the 1970s show a wicked sense of humor, lampooning political figures as well. She had ripe material with the four-year presidency of the ostentatious Julio César Turbay Ayala, but satire turned to darker political criticism after a government-led massacre in 1985: When the leftist guerilla group M-19 occupied Bogota’s Palace of Justice, the militaristic President Belisario Betancur set the building on fire, killing 98 people, including 11 judges as well as the guerillas and civilians.
Moody blues and purples offset by turquoise and mustard fill the canvases of a stunning room of works from the 1990s, when González sought ways to depict the despair of endless murders and assassinations without melodrama.
Colombia has been at war with itself and besieged by violence all of González’s adult life. That history imbues everything she has made in recent decades. Her latest works also address the humanitarian crisis of immigration (thousands of Venezuelans pouring into Colombia) and nearly apocalyptic environmental issues.
Needless to say, the show does not end with sunshine. The finally gallery includes landscapes made in 2017 with muted colors, in a sketchier style that almost seems to suggest an erasure of humanity. Among the most evocative, memorable and powerful paintings of the show, they make me glad González is still with us, and being seen.