Beatriz Milhazes

Beatriz Milhazes was born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she is still living and working. She studied fine arts at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. She draws on her country’s rich and diversified music, baroque architecture, the eclectic mix of Brazilian culture and the works of Matisse, Mondrian or Sonia Delaunay – her inspirations and the foundations on which she is building her extraordinarily colourful art. It is precisely this combination of indigenous and European influences that makes Beatriz Milhazes’s art so powerful. Facing one her paintings feels like looking through a kaleidoscope, with geometric shapes shifting and layering in multiple chromatic variations. This feeling of shifting colours and shapes is both what attracts and subjugates the viewer and what underpins her every work. Today her art can be admired in the greatest contemporary art museums of the world, including the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, among others.

Beatriz Milhazes’s signature is her quest to erase all traces of her hand, as if this multiple geography happened purely by chance, whereas it is actually underpinned by faultless organisation, as is evidenced in the way she assembles previously painted layers. For her, tapestry was a natural choice as a new means of expression, in close collaboration with PINTON. Beatriz Milhazes’s tapestry designs are above all very original, with variations of colour planes and geometric shapes that are unique in the PINTON Édition collections. After an initial collaboration instigated by an order from the White Cube Gallery, PINTON renewed its partnership with Beatriz Milhazes, giving a free rein to her joyful bountiful world.