Colombian artist Beatriz González, creator of Auras Anónimas, dies aged 93

Beatriz González, the Colombian artist who transformed Bogotá’s decaying columbarium into the memorial Auras Anónimas, has died aged 93. In 2009 she silkscreened one of eight silhouetted motifs on each of the 8,957 tombstones in the Central Cemetery structure; the images show pairs of figures hauling a body and act as a memorial to nameless victims of Colombia’s long political violence and drugs wars.

Across six decades González’s prints and paintings interrogated power and conflict through imagery taken from mass media, pictorial encyclopaedias, newspapers, postcards and popular religious material. Her 1965 suite Los Suicidas del Sisga was based on newspaper photographs of a couple who died by suicide, rendered in flat blocks of colour; she told the Tate in 2015 she was drawn to “the plain quality of the printed image, the simplification of the facial features, almost deformed by the discrepancy”.

In 1970 she began painting on discarded furniture from Bogotá’s markets, and in 1978 she exhibited a large painted curtain, Telón de la Móvil y Cambiante Naturaleza, at the Venice biennale. Her work turned more overtly political after the 1985 Palace of Justice siege; the 1987 pair Señor Presidente, Qué Honor Estar Con Usted en Este Momento Histórico uses a press photograph of the president and aides, with flowers in one work replaced by what appears to be a charred corpse.

Key Topics

Culture, Beatriz González, Bogotá Central Cemetery, Auras Anónimas, Venice Biennale