This article is structured around the curatorial criteria employed by Carolina Ponce de León— curator of Colombian artist Beatriz González’s first solo exhibition in New York—specifically the way she divides González’s work from 1965 to 1997 into distinct phases. As the curator herself states, the exhibition, which was anthological in nature, revolved around the way certain pictorial themes developed in those years, as well as González’s appropriation of pop culture and art history. The work from the first stage, which spans from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s, evidences a critical relationship between images taken from the print media (the press, posters, and almanacs) and the Colombian idiosyncrasy. In the second phase, which overlaps with the first as it covers the early 1970s to the beginning of the 1980s, González develops a “meta-history” of Western art, exploring the distance she perceives between Latin American and European cultural systems. According to Ponce de León, the most recent stage of González’s work, which begins in the mid-1980s, is concerned with a mythical dimension of history centered on the social experience of death.

This essay by curator and art critic Carolina Ponce de León (born 1957) is the principal text in the catalogue to the exhibition held at the Museo del Barrio in New York in 1998. It provides a rich and in-depth analysis of the most important works included in the show, addressing both their themes and formal approach. The analysis is interwoven with a discussion of the political and social events that took place in Colombia from the 1960s through the 1990s, as well as the relationship between the work of Beatriz González (born 1938) and other Colombian, as well as international, artists. Thus, the curator provides keys to interpreting González’s works, formulations that entail both the choices González made in her art and the cultural and socio-political context in which it ensued.

In 1988, Ponce de León had written an article on González, which this text both summarizes and complements (see Ponce de León, Carolina. “Beatriz González in Situ.” Beatriz González una pintora de provincia; Bogotá: Carlos Valencia Editores, 1988, pp. 12–37. [doc. no. 1088587]). In this text, Ponce de León revises some of the assessments in that earlier article and extends her analysis to include works produced by González after 1988, a period during which significant changes took place in González’s art and in Colombia. Further texts on this artist and her work include the retrospective book Beatriz González (Bogotá: Villegas Editores, 2005) and an article on one of her most recent exhibitions (Jaramillo, Carmen María. La Verónica; Bogotá: Galería Garcés, 2005).