Discover the vibrant works of one of the leading abstract artists working today
Tate St Ives presents a retrospective of the work of artist Beatriz Milhazes, who is known for intensely colourful, large-scale abstract canvases. The exhibition Beatriz Milhazes: Maresias traces the evolution of her artistic approach over the past four decades.
Beatriz Milhazes (born 1960, Rio de Janeiro) rose to prominence in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Geração Oitenta (1980s Generation), a pivotal Brazilian art movement that saw a return to painting as a dynamic medium for artistic expression, moving away from the conceptual art of the previous decade.
Milhazes is influenced by multiple sources including Brazilian and European modernism, Catholic iconography, Baroque colonial architecture, and the vernacular culture and heritage of Brazil.
Adapting the concept of collage to painting, Milhazes creates exuberant, densely layered works. In 1989 she developed her distinctive ‘monotransfer’ technique in which she paints her own motifs onto plastic sheeting before transposing them onto canvas. This process offers the possibility to retain the fidelity of the colours and intensify the effects of fluorescent and metallic pigments. It also allows Milhazes to create a smooth and defiant surface without losing the painterly quality.
In Portuguese, Maresias refers to the salty sea breeze that is part of Milhazes’ everyday life in the coastal city of Rio de Janeiro, where she lives and works. Nature is an enduring and increasingly important theme, and she finds inspiration in the landscapes around her studio, as well as in the forms and structures of the natural world.
Organised by and originated at Turner Contemporary, Margate, and adapted for presentation at Tate St Ives.
Introduction
‘My context has been surrounded by forests, mountains and coastal experiences; the development of a ‘tropical’ way of thinking. In St Ives it is very special for me to experience the same ocean as Rio de Janeiro. Same water, different cultures, but in the end it is all about life’
– Beatriz Milhazes
Beatriz Milhazes’s paintings and collages draw on sources ranging from the natural and urban landscapes of Brazil to histories of art and architecture.
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1960, Milhazes rose to prominence in the 1980s as a leading figure in the Geração Oitenta (1980s Generation) art movement. The artists associated with this group moved away from the austere conceptual art of the previous decade and embraced painting as a medium for energy and expression. Today, Milhazes is known for her vibrant, large-scale abstract canvases that present energetic contradictions of form and colour.
This exhibition spans the evolution of Milhazes’s practice over four decades. Organised chronologically, each room explores how Milhazes interweaves the local and international, historic and contemporary, combining references to Brazilian heritage with elements influenced by Western abstract painting. Nature is also an increasingly important theme in her work. The exhibition’s title, Maresias, refers to the salty sea breeze that is part of Milhazes’s everyday life in the coastal city of Rio de Janeiro.
This first room presents paintings from the late 1980s and 1990s. In earlier works, Milhazes had collaged fabric and paper onto her canvases. In 1989, she developed her ‘monotransfer’ technique that still underpins her practice today. She paints motifs onto individual plastic sheets, which are then carefully transferred onto canvas. Layering these transfers to repeat the forms, she effectively adapts the concept of collage to painting, while also retaining a deliberately painterly quality.
A note on the titles: in the late 1980s, Milhazes began to give her works descriptive titles. They are poetic and their meaning does not always translate directly from Portuguese to English. Where Milhazes has found an English translation that evokes the same meaning, we have included these below the original title.
The late 1980s and 1990s marked a profound breakthrough in Milhazes’s work. Against a backdrop of political change in Brazil following the end of the military dictatorship in 1985, Milhazes looked to the Anthropofagia movement of the 1960s. Inspired by the Brazilian poet, novelist and critic Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 manifesto, Manifesto Antropófago, this movement viewed Brazilian culture as a potent result of assimilating and transforming diverse traditions brought to the country trough colonialism. Milhazes incorporated this ideology into her paintings, creating a uniquely Brazilian aesthetic.
Milhazes’s canvases reflect her diverse influences. She borrows forms and motifs from Catholic iconography, Baroque colonial architecture and Brazilian modernist architecture, as well as floral fabrics sourced from markets and Rio’s Carnival Parade. At the same time, she has been inspired by Brazilian and European modernist artists including Tarsila do Amaral, Henri Matisse, Sonia Delaunay and Piet Mondrian.
‘Ivo Mesquita [curator and critic] once said that the most Brazilian aspect in my work is the freedom of putting together all different elements and creating my own context without fear. I think one of the greatest things we have in our cultural mix [in Brazil] is a feeling of freedom. I believe this feeling opened me up to find my way as an artist, as a painter, to develop my own artistic language in a global context.’
– Beatriz Milhazes
The early 2000s marked another turning point in Milhazes’s career. In 2002, she had her first large solo exhibition in Brazil at CCBB – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. The following year she represented Brazil at the 50th Venice Biennale. The expanded scale of her paintings during this period anticipated Milhazes’s developments in public art from 2004.
The paintings in the following sections embody Milhazes’s concept of ‘chromatic free geometry’ that she expanded on during this period. She balances the structure and order of her carefully planned compositions with a sense of spontaneity, movement and chance. Milhazes’s use of circles is integral to this dynamic quality. In earlier works they took the form of ruffles and gilded rosettes. Over time, beadwork circles, daisies, compass-drawn flowers and rings have all become part of her visual language. By creating dense compositions against a background of squares or rectangles, she offers the sense that the motifs could keep dividing and multiplying, like cells under a microscope.
Milhazes has long used natural forms in her work. Rather than stemming from a desire to imitate nature, this interest initially came from how nature is portrayed in the decorative and applied arts. A flower might be inspired by a pattered fabric, or a wave might refer to a detail from mid-century architecture.
From 2008, however, Milhazes’s works began to show the influence of Rio de Janeiro’s Copacabana beach, Tijuca forest and the botanical gardens near her studio. Whereas her sketches of flora had previously been inspired by references found in books, nature itself became a primary source. Her interest in cycles of renewal in the natural world is reflected in her use of circles and in motifs drawn from rivers, oceans, petals and branches.
She has described her ever-present circles as ‘the core of spirituality’, saying: ‘they are connected to the breath and speed of the forests, flowers, leaves, animal shapes, the power of the waves, water, oceans, the Earth’s rotation, the Sun, the Moon, day, night, sky, light. It has to do with the order of Nature. It’s both sensible and structured, and that’s what I try to show in my work.’
‘In our imagination, rivers are blue, but they can also be any other colour depending on the light. There’s also something magical about rivers because they support life.’
– Beatriz Milhazes
Collage, the combination of different elements onto the same surface, has always been integral to Milhazes’s approach. In the 1980s, she added a range of materials to her paintings on canvas. However, the introduction of her monotransfer technique – the layering of individual painted transfers – in 1989 allowed her to continue the basic principle of collage but with forms of her own making. This approach characterises even recent works such as Banho de Rio.
In 2003, Milhazes returned to making collages with found materials including sweet wrappers, branded packaging, tissues, and hologrammed and silkscreened papers. She sources these materials from her everyday life and travels, and so the collages function almost as a personal journal. She cuts them into shapes influenced by her environment, such as tropical fauna or details of Baroque buildings. The layering and contrasting of references to art, architecture and popular culture reflects her fascination with the ‘high low’, and the hybridity of everyday life in Brazil.
Ear defenders can be borrowed from the information desk.
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