Beatriz Milhazes

Beatriz Milhazes (born 1960) is a Brazilian artist. She is known for her work juxtaposing Brazilian cultural imagery and references to western Modernist painting. Milhazes is a Brazilian-born collage artist and painter known for her large-scale works and vibrant colors. She has been called "Brazil's most successful contemporary painter."

Beatriz Milhazes's practice includes painting, drawing and collage. Characterized by vibrant colours, optical movement and energetic visual cadences, her abstract work fuses a diverse repertoire of images and forms, combining elements from her native Brazilian context with European abstraction.

As a painter, Beatriz Milhazes uses a unique transfer technique, first painting on plastic sheets before peeling away the dried shapes and collaging them onto the canvas. When she peels the plastic away, the resulting image is superimposed onto the canvas. For these paintings, as well as her collages, prints, and installations, Milhazes draws on a wide range of aesthetic traditions, including folk and decorative art, European modernism, and Antropofagia, a movement founded in the late 1920s that proposed “cannibalizing” the supposedly high-minded European traditions to create a distinctly Brazilian Culture.

Figurehead of the 80’s Generation, period of the Brazilian art characterized by the return of young artists to painting, Beatriz Milhazes still lives in Rio, where she was born in 1960. It is in her studio with a view over the Botanical Garden that she polishes up her work.

She has had innumerous international solo exhibitions including Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2008); Fondation Cartier, Paris (2009); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2011); Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2012); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano (Malba), Buenos Aires (2012); Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (2013), Pérez Art Museum, Miami, USA (2014/2015), White Cube Gallery, London (2018), MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo (2020), Long Museum (West Bund), Shanghai (2021), Pace Gallery, NY (2022), Turner Contermporary and Galerie Max Hetzler Berlin (2023).

Milhazes is considered as one of the most important Brazilian artists, having participated at Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (1995); Sydney Biennial, Sydney (1998); Venice Biennale (2003); São Paulo Biennial (1998, 2004); and Shangai Biennial, Shangai (2006).

Her work is included in important museums and public collections such as Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York;  MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, New York;  Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Modern, London; SFMoMA – San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; MNBA – Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo; Instituto Itaú Cultural, São Paulo; Fundação Edson Queiroz, Fortaleza; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo Art Museum, Tokyo; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Milhazes is represented by Pace Gallery, New York; Galeria Fortes D’Aloia e Gabriel, Sao Paulo; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; and White Cube, London.

She lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Themes
Thematically, the work of Beatriz Milhazes has been described by one critic as "abstract, yet having something new to offer." This description is something that she believes draws people into her style, especially from a Western audience. Her work is known to contain many Brazilian folk references and can be interpreted as complex in this regard. These references, apparent in many of the vibrant colours and shapes, are often associated with the very poorest part of the population and are generally thought to be of little interest to the upper classes or intellectuals. These references have today changed in their meaning as the social elite has attached importance to them—the importance of being Brazilian and having Brazilian art. Finding the idea of a contradiction fascinating, it is another factor that influences the outcome of her art.

Her installation Gamboa II, for instance, was strongly influenced by the carnival in her native country Brazil which includes dance, costumes and parades. These elements are evident in the work with its bright colours that also embraces a feminine style to the work. 

Influence
Drawing from the optical reactions provoked by artists like Bridget Riley and Tarsila do Amaral, Milhazes believes that art is an essential way for people to aestheticize and exteriorize their thoughts and feelings. Her work often serves as an exploration of the concept of conflict. Filled with intense colors and shapes, her work serves to inspire a strong dialogue as well as “challenging eye movements over easy beauty.” Milhazes also draws her influences from many other female artists such as Sonia Delaunay, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Elizabeth Murray. She has also cited the canon of Brazilian art history as “empowering in its celebration of women artists such as herself.”

Collections (selection)
Milhazes' paintings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the picture Marotoloco (2014–25) is in the collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Banco Itaú, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.

Her 2000 painting "Meu Limão" "sold [in 2012] for $2.1 million dollars at Sotheby's in New York City, making her the highest-priced living Brazilian artist at auction." "Painting is the tree trunk of my developments, but other techniques have been playing a bold dialogue between them. An approach of new methods and techniques is very important for the evolving process of the studio practice. I also have an important body of work in special collage, screenprint, sculpture and set design. More recently developing murals and glass facades for public art projects. (Beatriz Milhazes, 2024)"

Technique
In terms of technique, Milhazes is predominantly concerned with the principle of collage, drawing from her combined knowledge of both Latin American and European traditions. The cultural mixing of her native Brazil is something Milhazes is aware of and to some degree communicates in her paintings as well as being in ties with the Brazilian modernist movement. Milhazes many other influences come from her own fascination with the decorative arts, fashion, and geometry. Milhazes has described her own work in saying "I think of my work as geometric, yet I can't put everything into a square or a circle." Her self-developed process of art making came about during her extensive researching of printing processes in the 1980s.

A slow but steady process, time is key to everything for Milhazes. Many of her works start with the painting of plastic sheets, which are then glued to a canvas. These plastic sheets are then peeled off of the canvas like a decal leaving behind paint. Some of these plastic sheets have been reused by Milhazes for as long as ten years. Often if a particular motif or drawing is well liked by the artist it will be kept, repainted, and added to multiple compositions. She describes these pieces of plastic affectionately, stating that they are imprinted with a memory, a memory that can cause irregularities. These irregularities are happily accepted by Milhazes as something that just comes with her process. In her works, Beatriz focuses on achieving a smooth surface as opposed to visible brush strokes with thickness being an intriguing topic but far from integral to her work and its importance. In this way she can play with the various sheen and levels of contrast that her materials provide in an attempt to further transform her canvas. In her own words Milhazes likens her process to the working-class, saying "I tell my friends that I'm like a bank worker...I come to the studio five days a week and do my job. I pay attention to detail, and try not to make mistakes."

Exhibitions
Milhazes has had solo and group exhibitions in a number of museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. From 4–21 July 2009, the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris presented a major exhibition of her work.

Inspired by late Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, artist Beatriz Milhazes created Gamboa II, an installation suspended from the ceiling at the Jewish Museum in NYC from May, 2016 to mid September, 2016.

In 2015, Milhazes presented her first United States career survey at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, in Florida. Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico introduced the US audience to her large-scale pieces from the 1990s.