Beatriz Milhazes

Beatriz Milhazes was born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she continues to live and work. She emerged as a prominent figure of the Geração Oitenta (1980s Generation), a pivotal movement in Brazilian art that marked a renewed engagement with painting after the predominantly conceptual approaches of the previous decade. In 1984, she participated in the seminal exhibition *Como vai você, Geração 80?*, and in the following years developed a distinctive visual language rooted in painting, collage, printmaking, and an intense exploration of color, pattern, and ornament. Milhazes’s work draws on a wide range of visual and cultural references, bringing together geometric abstraction, decorative traditions, Brazilian popular culture, architecture, music, and the natural environment of Rio de Janeiro. Her compositions incorporate flowers, leaves, fruits, arabesques, lace-like forms, and geometric motifs, combining these elements into complex, rhythmically structured surfaces. The landscape and visual culture of Rio have remained important to her practice, particularly the tropical vegetation and the surroundings of the city in which she has lived and worked throughout her career. A defining aspect of her practice is the *monotransfer* technique, which she developed in 1989. Rather than painting directly onto the canvas, Milhazes paints motifs and areas of color in layers of acrylic onto transparent plastic sheets. These layers are then transferred onto cotton or linen canvas using an acrylic medium. The process derives from monotype and collage, allowing her to construct paintings through the accumulation, juxtaposition, and superimposition of individually developed elements. This method gives her considerable control over the composition while preserving the material and visual qualities of painting. Her engagement with collage also extends into printmaking, artist’s books, and other forms of graphic production. *Coisa Linda* (2002), produced in collaboration with The Museum of Modern Art in New York, combined more than thirty screenprints with an original collage and texts drawn from Brazilian songs. The project explored the relationship between image and music and reflected Milhazes’s longstanding engagement with the sounds, rhythms, and visual culture of Rio de Janeiro. Milhazes has achieved extensive international recognition through major exhibitions and biennials. She represented Brazil at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and returned to Venice in 2024 for a special project at the Pavilion of Applied Arts. Her solo exhibitions have included presentations at Fondation Cartier in Paris, Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, MASP in São Paulo, Long Museum in Shanghai, Turner Contemporary in Margate, and Tate St Ives. In 2024, Tate St Ives presented a major survey of her work, following her long-standing international exhibition history. Her work is held in major public collections internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, among others. MoMA has exhibited and collected her work since the early 2000s, including *Succulent Eggplants* (1996), while the Guggenheim holds a significant group of her works. Across painting, printmaking, collage, and related forms, Milhazes has developed a practice in which color, rhythm, geometry, ornament, and cultural memory are brought into a continuous dialogue. Her work transforms diverse visual sources into densely layered compositions that reflect both the international histories of abstraction and the particular cultural and natural environment of Brazil.