Beatriz González obituary

Colombian artist whose haunting work dealt with questions of power and conflict for six decades

In the middle of Bogotá’s Central Cemetery stands the columbarium, built in 1943 to house the bodies of poor and unidentified people. Abandoned and neglected, in 2009 the decaying mausoleum was transformed by the Colombian artist Beatriz González, who has died aged 93. On each of the 8,957 tombstones, she had silkscreened one of eight silhouetted motifs, each featuring two figures hauling a body between them. Auras Anónimas (Anonymous Auras) is González’s haunting memorial to the nameless victims of Colombia’s near century of political violence and drugs wars.

González, whose prints and paintings mined questions of power and conflict for six decades, appropriated imagery from mass media, including pictorial encyclopaedias, postcards, sensationalist newspapers, religious calendars and pamphlets, initially to portray events both humdrum and tragic. Los Suicidas del Sisga (1965) is a suite of three paintings based on newspaper photographs of a couple who died by suicide. González renders the lovers, he in a hat, she in a headscarf, clutching a bouquet of flowers between them, in flat blocks of colour.

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