Beatriz Milhazes was afraid of diagonal lines.
“They were in the way,” she said, “pushing you off the canvas.”
But for the past two years, the Rio-based Brazilian artist has explored the angular lines of his paintings. As a result, I discovered that they actually gave her signature circle her three-dimensional quality. In other words, the sphere is reminiscent of the natural world and the earth. , she has become increasingly grateful during the pandemic.
The result is now on display at Pace in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. Milhazes is his first solo exhibition since joining the gallery in 2020, and his first in nearly a decade in New York.
“I feel like a scientist. To try new things and challenge myself,” Milhazes, 62, said in a recent interview at a gallery where her paintings had just been exhibited. I needed the provocation of, and it’s good to introduce you to what you fear… And the diagonals are what I’ve always feared, the imbalance they create. I realized that there is a need.
“It’s such an important moment when we talk about humans,” she continued. sex.”
The exhibition “Mistura Sagrada” (“Holy Mix”) includes 10 large-scale paintings and an extensive movable sculpture. These works are instantly identifiable for the vibrant colors and kinesthetic geometry that have long marked Milhases’ work. But something else is also working.
Mark Grimcher, President and Chief Executive Officer of Pace, said: “They’re more muralistic. It feels like a history of Latin American muralism.”
Glimcher notes that Milhazes is a pivotal figure in her own right, “merging the rigorous modernist history of Brazilian art with this personal and celebratory embrace.
“She created a new language,” he added.
Milhazes is a warm, naive presence with curly hair and a tentative smile, especially in what she calls a “triangle of references”: Matisse, Mondrian, Tarsila do Amaral (1886-1973) created a personal vocabulary with inspiration from Brazil and Paris.
Milhases’ work is reminiscent of 20th-century Brazilian artists. Ligia Clark When Ubi Baba So does Swedish artist Hilma af Klint.
Richard Armstrong, the outgoing director of the Guggenheim in New York, said, “She seeks to stabilize the ruggedness of the Brazilian landscape and bring it into some order.” Indescribable, she cools it in the same way Hilma af Klint warmed that Nordic sensibility.
While her work is playful and explosive, Milhazes says all her choices are very conscious and deliberate. She uses mathematical precision. “I’m a very rational person,” she said. “I’m developing a kind of system. I need a very solid structure.” “It’s not there by chance.”
Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960, during Brazil’s former military dictatorship, Milhazes said his mother taught art history at a university and his father was a lawyer. “Very intelligent people,” she said.
Milhazes started studying journalism at the Elio Alonso University. But it didn’t feel right and her mother suggested she transfer to Parque Her Larger Her Visual Her Art Her School.
“When I got into art school, it was kind of on a mission,” Milhayes said. “There was no question that that was what I wanted for my life.”
In the 1990s, she developed a collage technique in which she painted on a sheet of clear plastic, affixed it to the canvas, peeled it off, and imprinted the design onto the canvas.
Brazilian curator and critic Paulo Herkenhoff brought Americans into Millhayes’ studio, including Armstrong, then a curator at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.
“It was just amazing,” said Armstrong. “The delicacy of her technique, the vivid colors, the pictures started to sing the moment I saw them. They had a unique vitality.”
Her first major museum exhibition, held at the Icon Gallery in Birmingham, England in 2001, moved to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama. Her work of Milhases was exhibited in 1998 and her 2004 São Paulo Her Biennale. In 2003 she represented Brazil at the Venice Biennale and in 2009 held her retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.
She has done public art projects in New York. England, Manchester. Inujima and Naoshima in Japan.
Milhases’ work is heavily influenced by his strong ties to Brazil, including the Botanical Gardens and the Tijuca Forest. Carnival of Rio. movements of bossa nova music; sea.
“Many of her collages are made from source materials found in the shanty towns around Rio: old candy wrappers, discarded items from the local consumer culture,” says Millhayes and a friend of hers. Dealer Adam Scheffer said and brought her in. She paced when he was working in a gallery. “Also, her techniques she uses these A rubbed stencil will give a rough texture. “
Millhayes, who has spent 16 years at the James Cohan Gallery, said, “I am ready for change, to keep moving.”
“There was something very traditional about her approach to art making,” Cohan said. “To celebrate beauty and culture through abstraction at a time when the world is moving towards her politics of identity. She was defiant of her position. I have great respect for that.”
In her new body of work, Milhazes said she returned to modeling, especially flowers. “I wanted to reintroduce some elements about what I was missing,” she said.
“This is about nature. Color, possibility, the ritual of life and death,” she continued. “I wanted to draw again. When you see the flowers in person, you can see how much detail and color there is in them. I wanted to do this exercise again. I hope I can bring people to life.” .”