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Lot Essay
“I have always worked with memory, but my memory comes from the media,” González explains of her practice. “It amazes me how fast people forget the images from the news. The way that I fight against or try to prevent the memories from disappearing as fast is to use those images in my drawings and in my work. This process culminates in a work with a popular character, a monument but an ephemeral one” (in H. U. Obrist, Conversations in Colombia: Anañam-Yoh-Reya, Bogotá, 2015, p. 40).
Since the mid-1960s, González has assembled an archive of newspaper cuttings, graphics, and fine art reproductions—now numbering more than 8,000 pieces—that encompass crime scenes and society pages, Old Master engravings and global icons from Pope John Paul II to British royalty. These clippings first served as source images for works that broached kitsch and social satire, but since the mid-1980s González’s focus has shifted to the darker reality of Colombia’s chronic political violence, a turn prompted by the Palacio de Justicia siege in Bogotá in 1985 and the conscription of her son into military service the same year. The searing images of death, destruction, and displacement that followed bear witness to that history, their surfaces inscribed with her country’s collective and historical memory. González recently opened retrospectives at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2023) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2019), and she is represented in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Desplazamiento anverso y reverso featured prominently in her acclaimed solo exhibition, Desplazamientos forzados y paisajes elementales, held at Galerie Peter Kilchmann in 2017. “The subject prompted me to think about the causes of migration, and about nature,” González reflected. “There is a saying: ‘Art tells us things that history cannot say.’ I think my art recounts things that historians don’t see or cannot uncover. It can do so through repetition and by persevering with certain themes” (in A. Pica, “Fire, Air, Earth and Water,” Frieze, no. 192, January-February 2018). Across the works in this exhibition, González thematized global migration and climate change, drawing from two recent events: the severe flooding in Chocó, on Colombia’s Pacific coast, in 2014, which caused the displacement of tens of thousands of people; and the humanitarian crisis on the Colombia-Venezuela border in 2015, precipitated by the forceful deportation of thousands of Columbians from Venezuela. “That all these images come from scenes of refugees from war or natural disasters is clear,” noted critic Mitchell Anderson in his review of the show. “Regardless of execution, the overlooked become a visual motif throughout this work. The peasant as pattern” (“Beatriz González,” Flash Art, no. 316, September-October 2017, p. 98).
Desplazamiento anverso y reverso takes the form of a folding screen, which functions as a proxy for a “border,” notionally—and arbitrarily—dividing the space around it. The same nine subjects are repeated on each side of the panel: their laboring bodies appear both on a jungle-green ground and, more ominously and wraith-like, in black and white. The figures are more individualized in this work than in some related pieces, for example Zulía, Zulía, Zulía (2015) and Papel de colgadura Desplazados (2017), and their dehumanization is devastatingly real. Everyman and Everywoman, with their life’s possessions borne across their shoulders, they embody the indignities—as well as the enduring humanity—of the migrant’s journey. “González’s confrontation of the visceral without sacrificing the visual, though, lingers,” Anderson concluded. “In harnessing the humanitarian horrors of her local Colombia she has created work that is broad and anything but specific. History and the present are full of the poor moving and laboring while the rich look on bored or not at all. In her handling of motif, form, and color, González captures timelessness through its atrocities” (ibid., p. 98).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Since the mid-1960s, González has assembled an archive of newspaper cuttings, graphics, and fine art reproductions—now numbering more than 8,000 pieces—that encompass crime scenes and society pages, Old Master engravings and global icons from Pope John Paul II to British royalty. These clippings first served as source images for works that broached kitsch and social satire, but since the mid-1980s González’s focus has shifted to the darker reality of Colombia’s chronic political violence, a turn prompted by the Palacio de Justicia siege in Bogotá in 1985 and the conscription of her son into military service the same year. The searing images of death, destruction, and displacement that followed bear witness to that history, their surfaces inscribed with her country’s collective and historical memory. González recently opened retrospectives at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2023) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2019), and she is represented in major public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
Desplazamiento anverso y reverso featured prominently in her acclaimed solo exhibition, Desplazamientos forzados y paisajes elementales, held at Galerie Peter Kilchmann in 2017. “The subject prompted me to think about the causes of migration, and about nature,” González reflected. “There is a saying: ‘Art tells us things that history cannot say.’ I think my art recounts things that historians don’t see or cannot uncover. It can do so through repetition and by persevering with certain themes” (in A. Pica, “Fire, Air, Earth and Water,” Frieze, no. 192, January-February 2018). Across the works in this exhibition, González thematized global migration and climate change, drawing from two recent events: the severe flooding in Chocó, on Colombia’s Pacific coast, in 2014, which caused the displacement of tens of thousands of people; and the humanitarian crisis on the Colombia-Venezuela border in 2015, precipitated by the forceful deportation of thousands of Columbians from Venezuela. “That all these images come from scenes of refugees from war or natural disasters is clear,” noted critic Mitchell Anderson in his review of the show. “Regardless of execution, the overlooked become a visual motif throughout this work. The peasant as pattern” (“Beatriz González,” Flash Art, no. 316, September-October 2017, p. 98).
Desplazamiento anverso y reverso takes the form of a folding screen, which functions as a proxy for a “border,” notionally—and arbitrarily—dividing the space around it. The same nine subjects are repeated on each side of the panel: their laboring bodies appear both on a jungle-green ground and, more ominously and wraith-like, in black and white. The figures are more individualized in this work than in some related pieces, for example Zulía, Zulía, Zulía (2015) and Papel de colgadura Desplazados (2017), and their dehumanization is devastatingly real. Everyman and Everywoman, with their life’s possessions borne across their shoulders, they embody the indignities—as well as the enduring humanity—of the migrant’s journey. “González’s confrontation of the visceral without sacrificing the visual, though, lingers,” Anderson concluded. “In harnessing the humanitarian horrors of her local Colombia she has created work that is broad and anything but specific. History and the present are full of the poor moving and laboring while the rich look on bored or not at all. In her handling of motif, form, and color, González captures timelessness through its atrocities” (ibid., p. 98).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park