“Art has the power to make human ties stronger and help us think, feel, and look at things differently,” says Beatriz Milhazes. “Art can change people, and people can change the world into a better one.” In New York this spring, the artist’s humanistic worldview will be at the center of her first solo exhibition at the Guggenheim, whose permanent collection features a sextet of works by the Brazilian artist.
Time spent with Milhazes’s intricately collaged paintings unveils hypnotic abstractions, undulating arabesques, and playful riffs on floral motifs. Synonymous with the Rio de Janeiro native’s practice is her innovative “monotransfer” technique, developed during experiments with acrylics in the ’80s. Milhazes creates designs on transparent sheets, which are then transferred to canvas, producing reversed images. “A good process is when you create a dialogue with the work,” she remarks. “You cannot force something to happen nor follow what the picture is suggesting to you. Time and focus are the two main elements.”
In “Rigor and Beauty,” drawn from the Guggenheim’s holdings and key loans, and opening March 7, Milhazes traces this dialogue from the ’90s all the way to works completed as late as 2023. Throughout this artistic chronology, her influences—spanning Brazilian folklore, the decorative arts, regional spiritual traditions, and artistic movements like Op Art and abstraction, as well as the work of Henri Matisse and Piet Mondrian—loom large, with Milhazes absorbing and interpreting their disparate styles into her own signature.
Today, her oeuvre is as relevant as ever, evidenced by her recent inclusion in the 2024 Venice Biennale, created in collaboration with her fellow Brazilian, the curator Adriano Pedrosa. The Guggenheim exhibition will be an indispensable introduction for audiences who might not know her yet.
“It is amazing the way these works will meet each other and how a strong and special confrontation is created,” Milhazes says of seeing the breadth of her career collected at the museum. “The superposition of layers of paint, an environment of colorful compositions, will diverge from a dark, melancholic atmosphere to an intricate, dense, multicolored one. There are almost 30 years between them.”
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