SAO PAULO.- Beatriz Milhazes has spent decades building one of the most recognizable visual languages in contemporary Brazilian art: floral forms, arabesques, circles, geometric structures and bursts of saturated color layered into compositions that feel both rigorously constructed and exuberantly alive.
Now, an exhibition at the Pinacoteca de So Paulo turns the spotlight on a less frequently examined but essential part of her practice: printmaking.
“Beatriz Milhazes: Prints from the Collection of the Pinacoteca de So Paulo,” currently on view at Pina Estao through March 14, 2027, brings together 27 prints made between 1996 and 2019. It is the first time this group of works has been presented together, offering a sustained look at Milhazes’ long collaboration with Jean-Paul Russell, founder of Durham Press in Pennsylvania.
Curated by Renato Menezes, the exhibition is not simply a survey of Milhazes’ prints. It is also a study of what happens when an artist whose practice is rooted in painting moves into a medium governed by very different technical demands, rhythms and possibilities.
Some of the works are nearly two meters wide. Their scale alone challenges conventional ideas about printmaking as something intimate or easily reproduced. Milhazes layers multiple colors and matrices, using the mechanical processes of printmaking not to simplify her compositions but to make them increasingly complex.
That complexity is central to her work.
Milhazes is known for bringing together elements that might initially seem unrelated: Brazilian textiles, chita fabric, embroidery, weaving, Indigenous graphic traditions, modernist geometry and decorative ornament. Rather than quoting these sources directly, she absorbs them into a visual vocabulary that has become distinctly her own.
For Menezes, printmaking fits naturally into that history.
He notes that the medium adds another dimension to the popular and reproducible character already present in Milhazes’ painting, while forcing the artist to confront a different sense of time. A print cannot simply be approached like a painting. Each layer, matrix and application has to be considered within a larger sequence.
Milhazes herself describes the relationship between media as an emotional one. Her painting, she says, is nourished by the dialogue she maintains with the different techniques she works in, and by the distinct time each practice demands.
That sensitivity to process becomes especially visible in her use of screenprinting.
Traditionally, screenprinting can produce relatively flat areas of color. Milhazes pushes against that limitation. Through transparency, overlapping forms and repeated layers, she creates surfaces that appear to vibrate, producing unexpected depth within what is technically a flat image.
The exhibition includes works such as Uva selvagem and O pato, both from 1996, as well as Entre o mar e a montanha from 1998 and Noite de vero from 2006.
Across these works, familiar elements of Milhazes’ vocabulary reappear: flowers spread into garlands and portals, arabesques curl across the surface, circles become mandalas, and bead-like forms accumulate into decorative networks.
But the compositions never settle comfortably into ornament alone.
Milhazes continually assembles and reassembles shapes, allowing areas of intense density to sit beside spaces that appear almost empty. The eye moves back and forth between foreground and background, between decorative excess and carefully controlled pause.
That tension has long been one of the distinguishing characteristics of her work. What can initially appear spontaneous or celebratory is often built through meticulous decisions about proportion, repetition and color.
The Pinacoteca’s exhibition also has particular significance because the museum is the only institution in the world to own this specific group of prints. The works entered its collection through donations made in 2009 and 2024, giving the museum an unusually concentrated record of Milhazes’ collaboration with Durham Press.
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960, Milhazes emerged as part of the generation of Brazilian artists associated with the renewed interest in painting during the 1980s. Since then, she has built an international career while maintaining a vocabulary deeply connected to Brazilian visual culture.
Her work has appeared in major international exhibitions including the Carnegie International, Sydney Biennale, So Paulo Biennial, Shanghai Biennale and Venice Biennale.
Yet the prints at the Pinacoteca reveal that the consistency of Milhazes’ visual world does not depend on a single medium.
Painting may remain the trunk of her practice, but printmaking has given her another way to test the same questions: how color can generate space, how repetition can become rhythm, how geometry and decoration can coexist, and how images drawn from different cultural traditions can be transformed rather than simply reproduced.
Seen together, these 27 works make clear that for Milhazes, printmaking is not secondary to painting. It is another laboratory — one in which limitations become opportunities and repetition becomes a way of discovering something new.
“Beatriz Milhazes: Prints from the Collection of the Pinacoteca de So Paulo” is on view at Pina Estao, So Paulo, through March 14, 2027. The exhibition is curated by Renato Menezes.
