Beatriz González

War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture

5 October 2024 - 9 March 2025
work in collection

Beatriz González (1932) is the grand dame of contemporary South American art and an iconic cultural figure in her homeland of Colombia. War and Peace: A Poetics of Gesture provides an overview of the many decades of her impressive career. The exhibition also offers a new perspective on how González approaches figures and gestures as vehicles for conveying emotion.

Since 1962, González has used painting as a means of claiming and interpreting existing images from Western art, pop culture and photojournalism. As a result, her work has often been described as the South American version of pop art – an assertion the artist has always contested. González prefers to refer to herself – with some degree of self-mockery – as a “peripheral painter” whose palette echoes the colours of her native country. In the early 1990s, in response to the growing number of atrocities and political incidents taking place in Colombia, her work became darker and more radical in nature. She began to address themes such as death, drugs, soldiers and guerilla violence, disappearances and (more recently) migration as a national and global phenomenon. 

Besides key works by González, War and Peace will also present a number of series based on images from the news. The artist has taken these media images and elaborated them into paintings, drawings, prints and works made for public spaces. In each of these pieces, González concentrates on a single physical gesture in order to express empathy and mutual human understanding. The exhibition includes several works which De Pont acquired for its collection in 2021.

The exhibition is based on a concept by Cuauhtémoc Media and Natalia Gutiérrez and organized by Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo, MUAC, and Cultura UNAM, Mexico City in collaboration with De Pont Museum, Tilburg.

_{^{Image: Beatriz González, Empalizada, 2001, photo: Juan Rodríguez Varón}}