MIAMI, FL.- On September 19,
Pérez Art Museum Miami opened the first major U.S. survey of works by Brazilian abstract artist Beatriz Milhazes. On view through January 11, 2015, Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico features over 40 large-scale paintings, collages, and screenprints from the past 25 years of her career. The exhibition, for the first time, traces the development of her distinct painting style, which is characterized by her use of bold colors, the layering of geometric and decorative forms, and motifs from a broad range of art historical movements, including Colonial Baroque, European Modernism, and North American Pop Art. Jardim Botânico features works never before seen in the United States, as well as three new paintings made specifically for PAMM’s presentation. The exhibition highlights Milhazes’s one-of- a-kind artistic process in which she collages with paint to explore movement and materiality.
The exhibition’s title, Jardim Botânico, references both the neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro, home to her studio, and the dichotomy in Milhazes’ work between structure and rational order and sensuality, expression, and emotion. Organized by PAMM Chief Curator Tobias Ostrander, the exhibition follows a loose chronological order, with sequential sections focused around formal investigations. The works flow from Milhazes’ fascination in the 1990s with carefully rendered lace, ruffles, and decorative roses and pearls to her interest in bold colors, stars, hearts, and diagonal lines through to her incorporation of horizontal and vertical stripes in her large-scale paintings of the 2000s. Her more recent works show an increased use of interlocking, pure geometric forms that reference early European Modernism.
“Milhazes’ practice has been largely unexamined in the United States, and this exhibition offers an exciting opportunity to bring her energetic and visually compelling paintings to new audiences. Jardim Botânico is also particularly resonant in our region, which is home to one of the largest populations of Brazilian-born Americans in the country,” said PAMM Director Thom Collins. “The exhibition connects the experience of art, architecture, and nature, and we are looking forward to sharing it with our community and those traveling to Miami.”
Jardim Botânico exemplifies PAMM’s commitment to exploring work that reflects Miami’s cultural diversity and its location as a gateway to art and artists from around the world. Milhazes’s paintings, with their exuberant colors and decorative elements, parallel Miami’s tropical environment, art deco architecture, and vibrant atmosphere—bringing the experience of the city to PAMM’s galleries. Jardim Botânico is the first in a group of exhibitions that explore unique collage and transfer processes. PAMM will open exhibitions on the work of Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier and Canadian artist Geoffrey Farmer in October.
Milhazes’s signature painting technique creates highly textured surfaces that give her paintings grit and physicality, which she contrasts with the use of bright colors and geometric forms. By painting individual figurative elements in acrylic onto clear plastic sheets, she is able to test their placement and layer them on the canvas—manipulating the elements as collage materials. The sheets are glued to the canvas one at a time, creating layers of “decals.” As the glue dries, she rips each “decal” off to reveal the paint’s “back side,” with the image presented in reverse. This process removes some pieces of paint, giving her paintings a prematurely aged look and defying the expectation of a smooth canvas surface.
“The tension between order and emotive abstraction in Beatriz’s compositions invigorates her body of work, simultaneously engaging the viewer and the space,” said PAMM Curator Tobias Ostrander. “The scope of Jardim Botânico provides an opportunity to not only examine the arc of her oeuvre, but to explore how her investigations into decorative and geometric abstraction have inspired work by younger generations of artists. The exhibition emphasizes Beatriz’s important artistic contributions and highlights the continued relevance of her practice.”
Milhazes’s process emerged from a desire to reinvigorate painting, a seemingly static medium that was considered by many to be out of touch with contemporary life. An abstract painter, she is part of a generation of Brazilian artists who became known in the late 1980s, among them Daniel Senise and Adriana Varejao, for revitalizing painting through references to the medium’s history. Milhazes draws the basic motifs of her oeuvre from the history and culture of her homeland as well as from Western art history. Serving as sources of inspiration are the Brazilian movements of Tropicalismo and Modernismo, in which folkloric elements coalesce with influences from the Americas and Europe, as well as Henri Matisse, Piet Modrian, Sonia Delauney-Terk, and Bridget Riley.
Highlights from the exhibition include:
Santo Antônio, Albuquerque, 1994: This work is one of Milhazes’s earliest on view in the exhibition, and reflects her interest in the Colonial Baroque through her incorporation of lace, roses, and pearl motifs.
O selvagem, 1999: O selvagem marks a shift in Milhazes’s art-historical experimentation to North American Pop Art, with her use of flowers, hearts, and flowing lines. The shapes and lines are less delicate and measured than those in her earlier work.
Nazareth das Farinhas, 2002: This was the first of Milhazes’s works to be featured in a U.S. museum exhibition, when it appeared in the Carnegie International. In many ways a midway point of the works on view in Jardim Botânico, it demonstrates a blending of delicate lace motifs and bolder, less intricate forms.
Pierrot e Colombia, 2009-10: Milhazes worked on this triptych for two years, and it is one of her few works that explore vertical patterning and movement so thoroughly.
Flores e Árvores, 2012-3: This marks a new direction in Milhazes’s career, as the layering becomes increasingly linear and delicate, creating optical effects that recall the work of several Latin American masters of geometric abstraction from the 1960s and 70s.
Born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro, Beatriz Milhazes lives and works in the city. Known for her colorful, kaleidoscopic collages, prints, paintings, and installations, Milhazes is inspired by Latin American and European traditions. The reoccurring arabesque motifs present in her work are inspired by Brazilian lacework, carnival decoration, music, and Colonial baroque architecture. The balance of harmony and dissonance in her work references work by Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade, Henri Matisse, Vassily Kandinsky, and Robert Delaunay. Milhazes has exhibited around the world, and her work can be found at the Guggenheim Museum, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia, Madrid, Spain; the 21st Century Museum of Conte
