Beatriz González: In Series and Full Color

About This Event

Six decades of a Colombian painter turning tabloid photos and government portraits into flat, garish, unmistakably pop-inflected prints — sharper political commentary than the candy colors let on. This is the first Chicago retrospective dedicated to her drawings and prints, more than 80 works deep, opening the same year she died.

González was born in Bucaramanga, Colombia in 1932 and studied under the influential critic Marta Traba, launching her first solo show in Bogotá in 1964. She's often grouped with the pop art movement for her bright colors and appropriated mass-media imagery — but she never considered herself a pop artist, and her actual subject was almost always Colombian political life, especially La Violencia, the country's decades-long civil conflict. Her best-known work, The Sisga Suicides, reworked a real newspaper photo of a couple's joint suicide into something closer to propaganda-poster aesthetics than journalism — using pop art's visual language against the very media culture it came from. She died in Bogotá on January 9, 2026, at 93, months before this show opened.

Worth knowing: tickets run $32 for non-Illinois residents, $20 for residents, free for members — no single showtime applies since it's a regular museum exhibit running for over three months.