Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo will open a retrospective of Colombian artist Beatriz González on June 12, 2026, bringing more than 150 works to the museum through October 11. The exhibition traces González’s practice from the 1960s to the present, positioning one of Latin America’s most influential artists within a major European museum context.
According to the museum, González is known for her strong colors and distinctive graphic style, and for the way her work examines the power of images in everyday life. The retrospective draws on source material González has gathered throughout her life in Colombia, including damaged reproductions of canonical Western paintings and newspaper clippings related to violent deaths, conflict, and loss. In her hands, that material becomes the basis for work that addresses the force of imagery as both a cultural and political instrument.
The museum describes González’s practice as one that playfully confronts the dominant influence of Western iconography while also engaging with socially constructed ideas of taste and the visual hierarchies attached to different media and cultures. Her work is presented here as a sustained critique of how images communicate, influence, and shape perception, while also acknowledging histories of violence and displacement. The retrospective underscores how a deeply Colombian body of work speaks to wider questions of power and representation.
González’s range is central to the exhibition’s scope. Alongside painting, drawing, sculpture, and printmaking, she has used furniture such as beds, tables, and televisions as supports for painting. She has also made monumental scenic backdrops and large installations for public space. The museum situates these varied forms within themes that include political violence, the climate crisis, and life in Indigenous communities, showing a practice that moves between local specificity and broader global concerns.
The Oslo presentation is part of a touring co-production that began at Pinacoteca de São Paulo and continues through the Barbican in London before reaching Astrup Fearnley. The museum lists Pollyana Quintella and Natalia Gutiérrez as curators at Pinacoteca, Lotte Johnson at the Barbican Centre, and Solveig Øvstebø, director of Astrup Fearnley Museum, as curator in Oslo. That international structure signals the scale of institutional attention now being given to González’s work.
The exhibition matters not only because of its size, but because it places an artist whose work has long confronted public memory, political violence, and visual culture into a broader transnational conversation. At a moment when museums continue to reassess whose images and histories shape art history, González’s retrospective offers a pointed example of how contemporary exhibition-making can connect regional experience to global debates about power, representation, and the public life of images.
