Beatriz Milhazes

The joyful and exuberant paintings of Beatriz Milhazes blend elements of Brazilian culture with modernist abstraction. Born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro, Milhazes studied social communication at the Hélio Alonso University in Rio before pursuing fine arts at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, where she graduated in 1981.

Milhazes sees her work as evolving from three European modernists, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse and Sonia Delaunay, each contributing elements of their signature styles to her richly layered collations. Milhazes’s aesthetic framework is influenced not only by European Constructivism and geometric abstraction, but also by the culture in which her work took root.

Having grown up during the height of Brazil’s cultural transformation, Milhazes’s paintings express themselves as both subversive and inclusive, emblematic of a drive to throw off the formative, if diluting, effects of European colonialism to take from Europeans certain characteristics while at the same time foregrounding her own indigenous culture and forms.

Milhazes’s canvases combine a visual vocabulary of intricate patterns, spirals and petal formations, drawing inspiration from various sources such as tropical flora, Baroque architecture, popular music and Brazilian Carnival traditions. She creates her paintings using a unique technique where she paints on plastic sheets, allowing the paint to dry before transferring the designs to canvas. This method results in a layered, collage-like effect that gives her work depth and complexity.

Milhazes has exhibited her work internationally, earning widespread acclaim. Her first major solo exhibition was held in 1993 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in Rio de Janeiro. Since then, she has shown her work in prestigious institutions worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Her paintings are also part of important public and private collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland.