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The UN regrets the death of Colombian artist Beatriz González and highlights her legacy
Bogotá.- The UN Human Rights Office in Colombia lamented on Saturday the death of Colombian artist Beatriz González, who died on Friday at the age of 93, and highlighted her legacy for having made visible the victims of the armed conflict and her commitment to the defense of human rights through art.
“Teacher Beatriz González brought visibility to the victims of the armed conflict in Colombia. We will always be grateful for her commitment to human rights,” the organization stated in a message posted on X, in which it also expressed its condolences for the artist’s death.
UN Human Rights recalled that González donated photographs of his work ‘A contra luz’ to be exhibited in one of the entity’s annual agendas and stressed that art is “one of the most powerful ways to show what the guarantee of human rights (or their absence) means for people and for nature.”
“Through artistic creation, injustices are denounced, memory is preserved, or conscience is mobilized,” added the office, which expressed its gratitude to the artists who, with their work, defend human rights.
González is remembered because in 2009 she intervened in the 8,957 niches of the four columbariums of the Central Cemetery of Bogotá and framed in them eight silhouettes of soldiers and peasant carriers of the dead in an effort to convert that space, which was at the mercy of ruin and indifference, into a place of mourning.
Inspired by harrowing images of violence, which were captured by photographers throughout the country, González made this a place to alleviate the pain of families who never found their loved ones disappeared by the conflict.
“The disappeared have no name, they have no place, so I think that giving the disappeared a place of mourning is really a task and I am convinced that this will give them spiritual peace wherever they are,” the artist assured in an interview with EFE in 2021.
Throughout six decades of work, González’s work was exhibited in international venues such as Documenta in Kassel (Germany), the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), the Reina Sofía Museum and the Pinacoteca of São Paulo.
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