Beatriz González Aranda (Bucaramanga, 1932-Bogotá, 2026) was a Colombian painter, historian, art critic and curator. Her work starts from images that circulated in the mass media, such as newspapers, postcards and religious prints, and reinterprets them to comment on Colombian history and social reality. Early on she relied on humour; later, she turned to grief over violence and death, often working from press photographs by news photographers.
She studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional and then art at the Universidad de los Andes, where she was a student of Marta Traba. Her first solo exhibition took place in 1964 at the Museo de Arte Moderno in Bogotá. She painted on canvas, furniture and objects, and depicted three Colombian presidents wearing feathered headdresses, a reading many took as criticism of their ineffectiveness. As a curator she led the art and history collections of the Museo Nacional from 1989 to 2004, and as a historian she focused mainly on nineteenth-century caricature. Her work is held by institutions including MoMA in New York and Tate Modern in London.