A newspaper photograph had already been copied once before Beatriz González saw it. The Colombian artist noticed what the printing process had done to the picture and used those distortions in her own painting. That 1965 work opens In Series and Full Color, a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago that looks at how González worked with images she found in newspapers, art reproductions and popular ephemera.
The exhibition opens to the public Sunday, Nov. 15, and runs through March 1, 2027. Saturday, Nov. 14, is a member preview. The museum has brought together more than 80 works, including drawings, prints and sketchbooks. Some are going on public view for the first time. The show concentrates on works on paper, which gives visitors a way to follow how a picture changed as González drew, printed or returned to it.
What copying did to a picture
González was already working with reproductions as a student. A catalog essay from an earlier retrospective describes how she worked from a poster of Diego Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda that hung in a university studio. She pulled out details of the painting and worked them into pictures of her own. The poster gave her access to a painting in a distant collection, and the reproduction itself became something she could study and change.
The photograph behind The Suicides of Sisga I arrived by a different route. It showed a couple who had died, and one newspaper had printed a copy of another paper’s image. The printing had altered the portrait by the time González encountered it. She kept the traces of that process in her interpretation. The two sources offered different kinds of pictures: a poster that carried a famous painting into a classroom and a newspaper that carried a portrait onto a crime page. Both had already changed before she began to work.
From newspaper pages to prints
The Art Institute’s collection record for Illustrated News identifies it as a 1973 color screenprint on cream paper. It is one of the works pictured on the exhibition page, along with 1974’s The Backside of Royalty. The museum also shows two works from 1983 with paired titles, Frieze of Comedy and Frieze of Tragedy. The paired titles are an example of how the exhibition follows González across a series.
By the mid-1980s, González was using familiar printed sources to address political leaders, military power and people caught in violence. A Pérez Art Museum Miami retrospective singled out Los papagayos, a 1986 work about the Colombian response to the 1985 Palace of Justice siege. The Chicago exhibition follows the broader turn in her work. Images that might disappear with the next day’s newspaper could stay in circulation once she made them into pictures of her own.
An earlier Barbican exhibition set her prints beside painted furniture and large installations. It also showed how widely her subjects ranged: screenprints pictured Beethoven and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, while other prints drew on pictures of bodybuilders and crime reports. Chicago’s tighter selection gives those shifts in subject and medium room to register on the page.
Visiting the Chicago exhibition
The works are in galleries 124 through 127. The exhibition is included with regular museum admission. The museum lists a Nov. 21 conversation about the exhibition. That event is also included with admission, but it requires separate registration.
Readers outside Chicago can start with the Art Institute’s illustrated exhibition page or browse González’s works in MoMA’s collection, including Lullaby and Rionegro, Santander. Those collection pages identify the dates and materials of individual works. For more Chicago arts coverage, see Edit USA’s guide to the Chicago Art Book Fair.
