‘I feel like a scientist. It’s about experimenting with new things and challenging yourself. I needed this kind of a provocation – to introduce something that you fear is a good thing to do. And diagonals are something I always feared, the unbalancing they create. That’s why I found I needed to face it.’
B. Milhazes, quoted in R. Pogrebin, ‘Beatriz Milhazes Breaks the Circle’, The New York Times, 16 September 2022
‘I’d say that the use of colour is a characteristic that unites my work, which is funny because when I first started out all I wanted to use was white. Now, colour is a way for me to create contrast, drama and mystery. Every work I create is a mathematical dream and colours are a way of emphasising that.’
B. Milhazes, ‘“Every work I create is a mathematical dream” – an interview with Beatriz Milhazes’, in Apollo Magazine, 24 April 2018
‘The tapestry on the back wall has […] an unusually crisp simplicity, a sigh of completion – the palmetto shapes are pure Matisse. There are sea-like undulations, handsome black curlicues, ghostly built shapes, graciously sculpted leaf forms. The whole looks like a sequence of screens, perpetually shifting or sliding across each other. I mentioned Matisse – but the colours here have a tropical richness, a fierce, sun-struck density that he never achieved.’
M. Glover, ‘Rio Azul, Beatriz Milhazes’, The Independent, 20 April 2018
‘I would not say that I seek vertigo, but I like the optical effect. I like to play with your eyesight and the Op Art movement has been a reference to my work. Stripes arrived in my compositions after I understood that they would help me to keep a moving surface, working with straight lines and not circles. Better than that, I could have both and really change the rhythm of the composition with more radical intensity.’
B. Milhazes, ‘An interview with Beatriz Milhazes by Richard Armstrong, feb-mar 2018’, in Beatriz Milhazes: Collages, Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2018, p. 218
‘More recently I would say that I need nature around me. Rio de Janeiro, the city where I was born and live and work, is unique in that respect. It is a very big urban city together with a real nature. Rio has ocean beaches, mountains, forests… each in contrast with the others. At first and for decades, all elements in my work that could be related to nature were actually coming from applied art observation and my own imaginary. I’m seduced by what human minds and hands do to make their lives more beautiful. For the last 10 years I’ve been interested in observing nature as form and color, and introducing it into my studio practice. I believe I need nature more than my work. I always considered myself an abstract artist, even when some figurative elements are part of my composition. Actually, I often think about geometry and conceptual systems. It’s what guides me as a painter.’
B. Milhazes, ‘An interview with Beatriz Milhazes by Richard Armstrong, feb-mar 2018’, in Beatriz Milhazes: Collages, Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2018, p. 214
‘The forms first came from decorative, naive, and pop design images. Flowers accompany us or live with us in different rituals of life and death. Through decorative art we can almost tell all human history. They are the “small hands” of human gestures. My flowers belong to the applied arts, the motifs which inspired me were already developed with a human touch.’
B. Milhazes, ‘Beatriz Milhazes in conversation with Sebastian Preuss: Colors That Come from Life’, in Beatriz Milhazes, exh. cat., Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler and Holzwarth Publications, 2011, p. 3
‘Gamboa Seasons had a very distinct process because I decided to base the four paintings on a specific theme of the four seasons. To remain loyal to this theme, I needed to make drawings and project them onto the canvas. From that point I started painting. It was not easy to immerse myself in the painting process and at the same time follow my original drawings…really challenging, but very exciting. On the other hand, the architectural projects I’ve been developing since 2004 have been influencing my paintings. I think this is a possible new door to my work, introducing new questions, new problems to solve.’
B. Milhazes, ‘Beatriz Milhazes’, in Remember Everything, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2014, pp. 139
‘Milhazes revels in the colour, texture and malleability of paint and her pictures both surprise and stimulate by developing a catalogue of bravura patterns, forms, sumptuous grounds and marks to explore spaces into which we too can mentally project ourselves. However, for all their emotive energy, Milhazes’ paintings can also be cooly calculated in their underlying decentred construction, allowing fruitful dialogues between structure and disciplined improvisation. […] She offers a deeply personal experience of contemporary Brazilian culture and modernist art history through intelligently questioning the possibility of painting without a hint of unnecessary suspicion. One of the great pleasures of Milhazes’ paintings is the many references they bring to mind, and her work seems to both assimilate and transform their influences before our eyes. As an artist, she follows a paradigm of subtle developments and her paintings are candid in revealing intimate thoughts and sensations that run the gamut of emotions. The pulsing spirals, stripes and patterned wares make Milhazes’ paintings both a joyful and ecstatic experience. They seem to radiate heat and reflect strongly the environment in which they are made.’
S. Wallis, ‘Beatriz Milhazes: Polyrhythmic Painting’, in Beatriz Milhazes, exh. cat., Centre d’art contemporain du domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan; Paris: Domaine de Kerguéhennec, 2004, p. 23
‘In 2004, I received my first ever commission to create a glass façade for Selfridges & Co Department Store in Manchester, England. The scale was gigantic – seven stories high. It was an enormous challenge, not just due to the scale but also because I had to draw on an architectural plan, which I hadn’t done before. I have never made sketches or preliminary drawings for my paintings. Ordinarily I work directly on the piece, whatever its scale may be. To make an architecturally scaled drawing was quite difficult but exciting – the technique is a kind of collage with vinyl. Nothing is printed. Each shape is cut out and applied. I felt like it was a success. I found I could provide a very different experience from that viewing of painting by placing my images in a public space, where they become part of the architecture – around, and not merely in front of, the public. The images become part of that space and people cannot get away from them. […] It can be inspiring to work with different media that, in turn, bring new questions back to painting. I feel very lucky that I am able to work well in a variety of media. I helps maintain my interest in painting.’
B. Milhazes, ‘Arto Lindsay in Conversation with Beatriz Milhazes: Musical Expression’, in Parkett, Nr. 85, Zurich, 2009, p. 137
‘Together with crochet, jewellery, arabesques, and circles, flowers play leading roles in Milhazes’s painting, enabling the dynamic articulation of the work’s visual order, color distribution, and visual balance. […] Her multifunctional flower is in Avenida Brasil, for example, and her flora seems to emerge from a contemporary Boticelli Spring rendered with Warhol’s Pop feminine brushwork. This derivation eventually flattens all conceptual instances, from philosophy to ideology, under the industrial texture of matter and the gestural depersonalization of painting.’
P. Herkenhoff, ‘Peregrine Form’, in Beatriz Milhazes: Color and Volupté, Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 2006, p. 26
‘Constructing an image is a process for me. Each time I start a group of paintings, I have a range of ideas with some solid and defined elements that I want to develop for compositions. Each new group has a connection to the group before it – although I can go months without painting – but I need to introduce new issues, new challenges to move forward. This is what happened in 2001–02 when I introduced square forms of solid colors as an important pause and continuation of the circulatory sight on the surface. The stripes came along right after. I had finally managed to keep the optical activity of the compositions without being limited to circular shapes or forms. I also found out that color intensity was the key to making the compositions happen successfully.’
B. Milhazes, ‘Chromatic Joy: Beatriz Milhazes in conversation with Tanya Barson’, in Beatriz Milhazes Jardim Botânico, Miami: Perez Art Museum, 2014, p. 25
‘There is a residue of childhood pleasure in these paintings that is unashamedly seductive. These are works that use discipline in an eclectic manner to affirm life’s intrinsic visual energy. They also contain a florid fecundity of colour conceived through looking closely at the history of painting and the achievements of artists such as Piero della Francesca, Turner, Mondrian, Matisse, Bonnard, Bridget Riley and Joseph Albers, among others. All these artists took up the challenge and adventure of colour, realising that it can influence our lives in subtle and intense ways, influencing both mood and character. The exuberance of colour in Milhazes’ paintings has an almost hypnotic effect. It provides a bodily sensation akin to eating, as if one were taking in something nourishing. Colour provides the opportunity to intensify perception while drawing attention to the sensual act of looking and as Milhazes’ work has progressed her use of colour has become more intense and purposeful.’
S. Wallis, ‘Beatriz Milhazes: Polyrhythmic Painting’, in Beatriz Milhazes, exh. cat., Centre d’art contemporain du domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan; Paris: Domaine de Kerguéhennec, 2004, p. 23
‘What immediately comes to mind when I think of the tropics and the tropical being is an image of beauty, sensuality, and primitivism. That is a vision that enchants me, it’s a pure fantasy, dream, or desire for unknown pleasure. Gauguin made the voyage to seek out “paradise lost” and he brought these elements into his paintings. The Brazilian modernist project did the reverse: it nourished itself with European art in order to disseminate it in the tropics. Beauty enthrals me, but I think that, even if my work can be pretty, it represents a world of claustrophobia.’
B. Milhazes, ‘Christian Lacroix in conversation with Beatriz Milhazes’, in Beatriz Milhazes, exh. cat., Centre d’art contemporain du domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan; Paris: Domaine de Kerguéhennec, 2004, p. 68
‘I want to have optical movements, disturbing things; such visions that your eyes would be disturbed when you see them.’
B. Milhazes, in Beatriz Milhazes, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2012, p. 34
‘I’ve been inspired by the four seasons. Nature changes from one season to another and often motivates me to be an artist and develop things using this feeling. It probably comes from my passion for opera. Very often classical composers worked with the change of the seasons and how it influenced the drama of the characters. It is about creating areas of importance and how they can dialogue together, how they can make a composition from their own temperature and intensity.’
B. Milhazes, ‘An interview with Beatriz Milhazes by Richard Armstrong, feb-mar 2018’, in Beatriz Milhazes: Collages, Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2018, p. 218
‘Similar effects of preliminary, line-drawn arabesques appear in the bottom left-hand area of Suculentas Beringelas (Succulent Eggplants, 1996). These can be found alongside rudimentary, sketchy ochre lines that delineate compositional elements which have since been abandoned. As with Matisse’s paintings, these features expose the extent of the work that went into creating the image and, as a result, reveal in the final composition certain structural considerations, throwing attention onto the artist less as a “painter” and more as a “constructor” of images and signs. The appearance of revealed underlying intentions also gives the impression of what might be considered the work’s many stages of completion, even raising the question of whether the work is finished or not. How and what makes a painting complete can be thought of as subject matter in itself, particularly in contemporary practice. It is part of a wider questioning of value-used notions of good or bad painting. The self-referentiality of Andy Warhol’s 1962 series of Do it Yourself paint-by-numbers paintings and the dialectic between the finished and the incomplete work initiated by Matisse, both become subjects of Milhazes’ work. Her self-reflection all the while makes an even more subtle play with pictorial conclusiveness, though it is equally a matter of introducing deliberate imperfections, contaminations or premeditated incompletions.’
T. Barson, ‘Painting Mutability’, in Parket, Nr. 85, Zurich, 2009, pp. 121–122
‘Color is the core of my work. It’s by color that I begin and finish a painting.’
B. Milhazes, ‘Christian Lacroix in conversation with Beatriz Milhazes’, in Beatriz Milhazes, exh. cat., Centre d’art contemporain du domaine de Kerguéhennec, Bignan; Paris: Domaine de Kerguéhennec, 2004, p. 71
‘The rosette motif first became established in 1992. […] Milhazes’s rosettes retain the ingenuousness of a child’s drawing; they respect the canonical arrangement, but they “twinkle” in a particular way. Before accumulating wrapping papers, Milhazes accumulated the graphic symbols that one sees reappearing with a certain constancy in her paintings. Her work is powerfully decorative because it juggles with these symbols, having submitted natural patterns to decorative reduction. Action, reaction. Inspiration, expiration. Reduction, expansion. In Milhazes’s work, decorative efficiency is accompanied by a sort of disembodiment. Not only are the motifs she uses taken from elsewhere, but they are indexed in a personal icon library where she can draw on them at will, rather like the pouncing patterns used in embroidery or the cogwheels driving the movement in a gear. In each case they are loans, or, very explicitly, quotations and, with time, self-quotations.’
F. Paul, ‘Un numêro monstre. From distraction to displacement: the collages of Beatriz Milhazes’, in Beatriz Milhazes: Collages, Rio de Janeiro: Cobogó, 2018, pp. 68–70
‘In 1989, I deeply felt a need to work only with paint. I wanted to develop my own elements, motifs, colors and shapes, but at the same time, I wanted to keep the collage concept and process. I was making some experiments with a monotype print process with wet acrylic paint on plastic sheets when I discovered the technique I’ve been using since, which is like a dry monotype or transfer. The discovery was crucial for the development of my work. With this technique, I can work with acrylic paint only, create my own motifs and elements, keep the intensity of the colors, and use metallic and fluorescent colors. The film I paint on is like a skin, so I can hold it and only glue it to the canvas after I’ve found its right spot. The method allows me to build the composition with thin layers of paint, so the concept of collage is still there, but in a painterly way. All the layers are very smooth. They sometimes show a brushstroke, but they’re very graphic and construct a materiality.’
B. Milhazes, ’Chromatic Joy: Beatriz Milhazes in conversation with Tanya Barson’, in Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico, exh. cat., Miami: Pérez Art Museum, 2014, pp. 25–26
‘[Assim na Terra como no céu] represented a step forward in the problematization of structure and repetition in Milhazes's oeuvre. At this point, her pictorial space demanded a new organization: the grid. […] Whereas Milhazes's mathematics was previously rendered with patches of print fabric, now the grid was assigned a conceptual task. […] The spaces in Assim na Terra como no céu are filled with the peace symbol designed for the Nuclear Disarmament Campaign in the 1950’s. Milhazes appropriates it as a Pop symbol of hippie culture and rock music. [...] By organizing space with a view to securing its stability and, on the other hand, afflicting it with the exhaustive repetition of circular motifs, Milhazes seeks the significant difference. Here, her painting seems influenced by the words of poet Manoel de Barros: “To repeat and repeat, until it comes different.”’
P. Herkenhoff, ‘The 1980’s’, in Beatriz Milhazes: Color and Volupté, Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves, 2006, pp. 22–24
‘I’ve actually never engaged in a conventional process of painting. Even my very first paintings were made of fabric and paper collages that constructed a physical structure along with their stretch. So, I’ve always been interested in the relationship between the two- and three-dimensional possibilities of painting. Frank Stella was an artist that I observed at that time, in the early ’80s. Most of the fabrics I used came from Carnival Costumes, which I then painted. Until 1988, my paintings were made of acrylic paints, collages of handmade printed canvases, industrial fabrics, and sometimes papers glued onto plain canvases.’
B. Milhazes, ‘Chromatic Joy: Beatriz Milhazes in conversation with Tanya Barson’, in Beatriz Milhazes: Jardim Botânico, exh. cat., Miami: Pérez Art Museum, 2014, p. 25
All works: © Beatriz Milhazes
here