‘Nature almost dead’, double homage to popular art and painting

High art and popular art have always been fertile ground for discussions. And if someone in Colombia, from the so-called “cult art”, has investigated and inquired about popular art, it has undoubtedly been the artist, historian and researcher from Santander Beatriz González. recently edited almost still life, a book by José Ruiz, who has thoroughly investigated the artist’s archive, in which he found great material from the Molinari Printing House, which from 1952 was dedicated to printing prints of religious and mythological themes (many times somewhat misrepresented) and that have served as basic material for various Colombian artists. He has also investigated the material produced by this now defunct printing press. Ruiz, who was born in 1994, lives and works in Bogotá. He studied Art and Art History at the Universidad de los Andes. His artistic and curatorial practice revolves around working with archives of art, film, architecture, and popular graphics. He has carried out projects for the La Tertulia Museum, the National Library, the Bordeaux Museum of Contemporary Art and the Bank of the Republic, among others. To know the origin of this publication, it is necessary to go back to 1970, when the teacher Beatriz González presented a work titled almost still life. It was a figure of Fallen Lord of Monserrate that she had painted with synthetic enamel on a metal sheetand had embedded it in a metal bed that she had found on one of her expeditions to material warehouses with her husband, the architect Urbano Ripoll.