NEW YORK, NY.- The Guggenheim New York presents the first museum exhibition in New York devoted to the work of Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960, Rio de Janeiro), a global contemporary artist who engages with her Brazilian cultural heritage and identity through the language of abstraction. This focused exhibition features a group of fifteen paintings and works on paper from 1995 to 2023, drawn from the museum’s permanent collection and augmented by key loans, which together contextualize the broader narrative of her artistic evolution.
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Renowned for her bold, colorful abstractions, Milhazes’s complex body of work spans four decades, from the 1980s to the present. Her practice encompasses sculpture, collage, print, textiles, public art, and especially painting, all featuring intricate patterns and dynamic forms grounded in geometry.
Milhazes’s work is deeply rooted in Brazilian history and tradition, drawing from colonial art and architecture, decorative arts, and the vibrant celebration of Carnival—a week-long festival in Rio de Janeiro that showcases Brazilian culture through parades, music, performances, and elaborate costumes. She is also influenced by Tropicália, a 1960s cultural movement that blended art, music, and literature to celebrate Brazilian identity while protesting the repressive military regime. The rhythms and colors of bossa nova, a musical style born in Rio de Janeiro in the late 1950s, also echo throughout her work. Beyond these influences, she engages with the work of artists like Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Tarsila do Amaral, whose creations were fundamental to the visual and aesthetic developments of Brazilian Modernism.
“The Guggenheim is thrilled to present the first New York museum exhibition of Beatriz Milhazes. Her colorful abstractions interweave references to art history and the natural world while merging Brazilian cultural motifs with modernist influences. The show offers a rare opportunity to engage with her unique creative process and see how she reinforces her Carioca roots, creating an elaborate lexicon of allusions and symbols within a vernacular Brazilian context,” states Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York.
In 1989 Milhazes developed an innovative technique she calls “monotransfer,” inspired by the monotype printing process, in which a painted image is transferred from a plate to paper, producing a mirror image. The artist’s methodical process begins with painting motifs onto clear plastic sheets with acrylic paint. Once the acrylic dries, she layers and adheres the painted films to canvas one by one, constructing her abstract compositions through the careful arrangement of these distinct motifs. She then peels off the plastic sheets, revealing the forms in reverse. Since the painting process is unpredictable, her canvases often contain incomplete or faint structures formed by residual traces of paint from previous works, as she reuses the same plastic sheets over many years. Milhazes embraces these elements as acts of chance and improvisation, integrating them into new pieces as fortuitous inclusions. The result is a densely textured composition in which vibrant colors, organic shapes, and geometric patterns interact harmoniously on a surface imbued with the memory of the artist’s actions.
The early paintings in this exhibition, primarily from the museum’s collection—such as Santa Cruz (1995), In albis (1995–96), and As quatro estaçōes (The Four Seasons, 1997)—draw inspiration from the opulence of 18th-century Brazilian Baroque colonial churches and ornamental garments. Milhazes synthesizes these influences into abstract and representative motifs, with circles and arabesques, delicate crochet and lace, flowers and floral patterns, decorative ruffles and ribbons, and ornate pearls and ironwork emerging throughout her compositions. By 2000, Milhazes began exploring optical effects in her paintings, using linear repetitions to create undulating patterns and visual rhythm, as seen in Paisagem carioca (Carioca Landscape, 2000), O cravo e a rosa (The Carnation and the Rose, 2000), and O Caipira (The Caipira, 2004).
The works on paper in this exhibition, spanning 2013 to 2021, demonstrate Milhazes’s continued experimentation with the medium, particularly since she began formally creating collages during a 2003 residency at the Centre d’art contemporain du Domaine de Kerguéhennec in Bignan, France. Combining mass-produced elements like branded shopping bags, chocolate bar wrappers, and patterned paper with cutouts from her own screenprints, Milhazes creates patterns with recurring motifs such as arabesques, stars, leaves, flowers, circles, squares, and rectangles. Her collages function like personal journals, reflecting fragments of the artist’s reality and her commitment to color and inventive form.
Her recent paintings, including Mistura sagrada (Sacred Mixture, 2022), mark a shift toward exploring the spiritual power of nature in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although references to the natural world have been present since her early career, here she delves into cycles of renewal—life and death—through colorful, angular forms and intricate patterns. Organic elements, reflective of Milhazes’s proximity to Rio de Janeiro’s Botanical Garden, Tijuca Forest, and Copacabana Beach, are echoed in the harmonious geometries, conceptual systems, and chromatic universes that span her oeuvre.
“With almost thirty years between the earliest and most recent works in this exhibition, the pieces interact in remarkable ways, creating a strong and distinctive visual confrontation while offering a valuable opportunity to observe their evolution. I would especially note the convivial relationships between abstraction, figuration, geometry, and free forms in these works, as well as the superposition of their paint layers. The colorful compositions diverge from dark and melancholic to bright and intricate, creating a dynamic atmosphere in the exhibition,” states Beatriz Milhazes.
This exhibition is the second installment in the exhibition series Collection in Focus, which highlights the museum’s permanent collection. The series is part of a reinvigorated effort to make the Guggenheim New York’s world-renowned holdings more accessible to the public.
Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty is organized by Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, Curator, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, New York.
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