Running from February 25 to May 10, 2026, the exhibition marks the artist’s first retrospective in the United Kingdom and her most ambitious presentation in Europe to date. It celebrates six decades of a practice that radically transformed Latin American contemporary art and persistently questioned how images construct power, memory, and mourning
Bringing together more than 150 works, many of which are being shown in the UK for the first time, the exhibition demonstrates how the artist consistently rejected hierarchies of value assigned to specific materials or media.
Paintings, sculptural objects, furniture interventions, monumental curtains, painted backdrops, and installations create a journey through the work of one of the most significant figures in Latin American art.
Beatriz González built her work from found images she collected throughout her life: from worn reproductions of Western art history paintings to press clippings documenting violence and loss.
These sources were transformed through a graphic style and distinctive color palette. With satire, tenderness, and critical vision, she addressed violence in Colombia, socially constructed ideas about taste and value, the legacies of colonialism, and the displacement of communities.
The exhibition presents key works such as Los suicidas del Sisga (1965), where González translates a press tragedy into planes of saturated color; her celebrated furniture interventions from the 1970s that turned beds, tables, and televisions into pictorial supports; and a crucial shift from the political satire of Decoración de interiores (1981) toward testimony of violence in Las Delicias (1996–98) and A Posteriori (2022), works that invoke the collective memory of Colombia’s armed conflict.
This retrospective confirms Beatriz González as one of Latin America’s most important artistic voices, a creator whose work, rooted in Colombia’s specific history, resonates powerfully with the global urgencies of our time.
The exhibition is co-produced by Pinacoteca de São Paulo (August 30, 2025 – February 1, 2026), Barbican, London (February 25 – May 10, 2026), and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (June 12 – October 11, 2026).
Beatriz González (1932–2026) is one of Colombia’s most important artists and a central figure in the history of Latin American contemporary art.
Her most recent exhibitions include the retrospective «Beatriz González: a imagem em trânsito» at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo (2025); «Beatriz González. War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture,» De Pont Museum, Tilburg (2024); and «Beatriz González. Guerra y paz: una poética del gesto,» MUAC, Mexico City (2023).
This article was published by a journalist from Cooltura Total with information provided by Galería Casas Riegner in Bogotá.
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