Beatriz Milhazes

Biography

First the motif is painted on a sheet of plastic. When the paint has dried, the sheet is glued to the canvas and then torn away, and the image stays on the canvas, smooth, with no trace of the brush, as if from a transfer picture. Some of these sheets Beatriz Milhazes has used for ten years: a successful motif is kept, repainted and glued into new compositions. The film, she says, holds a memory, and that memory produces irregularities which the artist is glad to accept. She invented the method herself in the 1980s, when she was doing a great deal of printmaking.

Milhazes was born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro and lives there still. In 1978–1981 she studied social communication at the Hélio Alonso college, and in 1980–1982 she attended the School of Visual Arts at Parque Lage. Her generation, the “80s Generation”, brought young Brazilian artists back to painting, and she became one of its most visible figures.

Her early works of the 1980s are full of petals, buds, butterflies and peace signs. Then the compositions became more forceful: bursts of concentric circles, floral ornament, an almost psychedelic palette. In these paintings it is easy to recognise the carnival colours of Rio and the patterns of folk art, and behind them European abstraction. She calls her painting geometric but admits that she cannot fit everything into a square or a circle. Among the reference points she names are the optical effects of Bridget Riley and Tarsila do Amaral, as well as Sonia Delaunay, Georgia O’Keeffe and Elizabeth Murray. She also draws on Antropofagia, the Brazilian movement of the late 1920s that proposed to “eat” the high European tradition in order to arrive at a Brazilian culture of its own. Critics point to another contradiction, one that the artist says interests her: folk motifs were once considered the property of the poor, of no interest to the elite and to intellectuals, and now that same elite treasures them as a sign of Brazilianness. I think her paintings rest on this shift of meaning: the pattern stays the same, and what changes is who is looking at it.

She works, by her own description, like a bank clerk: five days a week in the studio, attention to detail and an effort not to make mistakes.

From the mid-1990s she began to be invited to major international exhibitions. She took part in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh (1995), the Biennale of Sydney (1998), the São Paulo Biennial (1998 and 2004), the Venice Biennale (2003) and the Shanghai Biennale (2006). Solo exhibitions were held at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2008), the Fondation Cartier in Paris (2009), the Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2011), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon and the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2012), and the Paço Imperial in Rio de Janeiro (2013).

Her first large survey in the United States, “Jardim Botânico”, was shown in 2014–2015 by the Pérez Art Museum Miami; there Americans saw her big canvases of the 1990s. In 2016 her installation “Gamboa II” hung from the ceiling of the Jewish Museum in New York, inspired by the work of the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and by Brazilian carnival with its dances, costumes and parades. Then came White Cube in London (2018), the São Paulo Museum of Art (2020), the Long Museum in Shanghai (2021), Pace Gallery in New York (2022), Turner Contemporary and Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin (2023).

Milhazes calls painting the trunk from which the branches spread: collage, screenprinting, sculpture, stage design and, in recent years, monumental murals and glass facades for urban projects. Her works are held by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Tate Modern, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou, the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro, the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.