This is an essay by the researcher and curator Carmen María Jaramillo published in a monograph on the Colombian artist Beatriz González. The author’s goal is to shed light on how González’s work exposes and challenges several systems of representation—such as propaganda, photojournalism, and the widely circulated facsimiles of European paintings—in order to disclose the ideological construction of images. By both appropriating and re-contextualizing images created by others, the artist reveals the sociocultural context in which such images were conceived and how reality itself is produced by means of representation. Jaramillo focuses on works produced in the 1960s, 1970s, and the first half of the 1980s, thus identifying three ways in which González re-signifies appropriated images throughout her pictorial process. She first examines works where the artist appropriated reproductions of Western art masterpieces to make a funny desecration of art history and, incidentally, criticize the art market. Then, she looks at works in which the artist transformed photographs from the local press into paintings to demonstrate how images disseminated through the media are never neutral. In the last section, Jaramillo analyzes González’s object-based paintings, which fuse imagery appropriated from historical nineteenth-century paintings and religious iconography with found industrial objects in order to question the limits of painting as a medium.

In this essay, the independent researcher and curator Carmen María Jaramillo (b. 1958) contextualizes the work of the artist and art critic Beatriz González within Colombian art of the twentieth century. She observes that while other artists have appropriated objects to create collages and assemblages, González, for her part, has appropriated images to re-signify them by means of her own pictorial process. The artist’s sources are wide-ranging, going from history paintings to print media, from advertising to illustrations, and so on. Jaramillo argues that by appropriating images by others, she explores their aesthetic reception as seen from different times, places, and cultural milieus. At the same time, the artist shows how reality has been constructed, narrated, and passed on through systems of representation. The scholar explains that González is indeed the first Colombian artist to use photography as a working tool. As a matter of fact, most of the images she works with have gone through a photographic process, whether they are pictures from the media, pictures of reproductions, pictures of impoverished quality, or pictures of canonical artworks. Working from copies, she produces new originals, questioning the idea of the unique object and bringing to the fore how “universal” (i.e., European) art is perceived in a local context, what she calls “her province.” González also challenges the art historical canon and common assumptions about painting with her works painted on everyday, found objects. She considers these objects as paintings, rather than sculptures, thus re-defining this medium with the use of unconventional supports and techniques.

This essay was published in a monograph on Beatriz González (2005), which also includes essays by the American art critic Holland Cotter and the Colombian art historian María Margarita Malagón. The former text is a complementary perspective on works discussed by Cotter in his review of González’s 1998 solo exhibition at El Museo del Barrio (New York City), written for the The New York Times [see the ICAA Digital Archive (doc. no. 1150182)].

Beatriz González (b. 1938) is a Colombian artist based in Bogotá. Her career spans six decades, from the early 1960s to today, and includes paintings, drawings, silkscreen prints, and curtains, as well as three-dimensional paintings on recycled furniture or everyday objects. González, who calls herself a “provincial artist,” appropriates and reinterprets images from the mass media and notable notorious European classic artworks; therefore, she has often been associated with the Pop Art movement, a position that she ostensibly rejects. Her work, in fact, does not deal with consumer culture itself; instead, it makes a chronicle of Colombia’s recent history. Indeed, it implies an investigation of middle-class taste in Latin America with regard to European artworks and exposes the uneven relationship between her country and the mainstream of the hegemonic centers (Europe and the United States), which is an undeniable legacy of colonialism. Beyond her expansive oeuvre, González has worked as a curator and museum education, in addition to art writing. [To read some examples of her critical writing on her own work, see documents numbers (1078663) and (1093273); in reference to other artists see documents (860646), and (1098901)].