With the painting “Los suicidas del Sisga”—an arresting image that depicts an elegantly dressed couple holding hands, a sprig of flowers between them—Colombian artist, curator, and art historian Beatriz González began her public development as an artist and witness to the tragicomic history of her country. In her ambitious and compelling study of the playful and provocative artist, Ana María Reyes argues that “González's works serve as effective critical tools that interrogate the politics of taste, the boundaries of cultural circuits, and art's relation to symbolic violence” (5).
Reyes's study of the artist focuses on the beginnings of González’ artistic trajectory (1964–70), which coincides with the end of La Violencia and the beginnings of the Cold War era. Reyes argues that González's art and her engagement with artistic criticism and the art word, in contrast with the prevailing artistic discussions that “reduced aesthetic debates to a decontextualized formalist analysis” (5), engage directly with the impact of violence and political, social, and cultural turbulence on Colombia's collective national psyche. Reyes argues that “at the center of political violence in Colombia were other forms of symbolic violence and detachment” (5) that were expressed in the world of art.
Each chapter discusses a single exhibition of González's work, organized chronologically from earliest to most recent. This organization helps the reader understand not just the development of González as an artist, but also the ways her artistic oeuvre highlights and complicates the cultural terrain of the post-Violencia period that involved modernization projects, redefinitions of culture (high and low), and challenges to Cold War discourses. This organization also provides the reader with new insight into the relationship between González and her teacher, mentor, and devoted supporter, the influential art critic Marta Traba, who, like González, helped popularize art.
Chapter 1 discusses González's first solo exhibition in 1964 at the MAMBO (the Bogotá Museum of Modern Art), which featured a work based on Vermeer's “The Lacemakers.” Chapter 2 presents an engrossing exploration of the exhibition in 1965 of the aforementioned “Los suicidas del Sisga,” which, Reyes argues, is considered a “watershed moment in the artist's career and in the history of Colombian art” (28). Chapter 3 thoughtfully discusses González's second exhibition at the MAMBO, which as Reyes argues, “positioned [González] amid class, gender, and generational clashes that were dramatically unfolding in 1967” (29). Chapter 4 engages critically with the ways González's work, particularly a reimagining of Simón Bolívar, challenged the artistic sensibilities of critics and audiences alike, and, indeed, “struck a nervous chord with citizens who felt their status and patrimonial culture were being threatened by both rapidly changing social categories and Cold War revolutionary ideas” (30).
Chapter 5 broadens the discussion of González's engagement with making indelible images of violence, the tragicomic history of Colombia, and the sacred and profane in her painting “Almost Still Life,” part of the Second Medellín Biennial in 1970. An epilogue moves beyond this seminal early period of González's parodic and ‘kitschy’ work to her more somber artistic aesthetic “in response to Colombia's escalating violence since the mid 1980s when narcoterrorism and paramilitarism aggravated the armed conflict” (30).
In this engaging and substantial work, Reyes provides new insight into both González and her oeuvre. Writing in an accessible style, Reyes introduces González to English-speaking non-specialists and specialists in the fields of art and art history who are interested in the intersections of Colombian history, cultural production, and camp, and who may not be familiar with this well-known Colombian artist.
