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Descriptif du lot
With its mesmerising kaleidoscopic surface, Moinho vermelho (Red Mill) (1999-2000) is a virtuosic work dating from a pivotal moment in Beatriz Milhazes’ oeuvre. In lustrous hues of gold, azure, orange, teal and magenta, a dazzling cornucopia of organic and geometric forms explodes across the surface. Fruits, flowers, stars and spirals rain down in dizzying optical motion. Shapes and textures accumulate in complex layers: a product of the artist’s signature transfer technique. Painted during a period of mounting critical acclaim, the work demonstrates the heightened colours, hard-edged abstract forms and Pop-like motifs that came to define Milhazes’ work at the turn of the millennium. It articulates the central pillars of her practice, weaving together elements of her Brazilian heritage with influences drawn from European Modernism. Its title—translating to ‘moulin rouge’ in French—captures something of this collision, fusing the intoxicating rhythms of the Rio carnival with an evocative nod to the thrilling creative energy of fin-de-siècle Paris.
Milhazes came of age during the 1980s, at a critical moment in painting’s history. The spirit of Brazil’s so-called ‘Geração Oitenta’ (‘80s Generation’) was matched by the rise of Neo-Expressionism in Europe and North America, both proposing a return to the visceral pleasures of pigment. As a student at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro, Milhazes plunged deep into the medium’s histories. She admired Brazilian avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s, including Neo-Concretism and Tropicália, as well as the works of Tarsila do Amaral. In 1985, she took her first trip to Europe, where she encountered important examples of Fauvism and Op Art in the flesh. She was particularly inspired by the works of Henri Matisse, which offered her a model for combining ornamental, decorative languages with rigorous abstract principles. She would later discover the work of Sonia Delaunay, whose influence resounds in the present painting’s interlocking concentric circles and diagonal planes.
These international lessons in abstraction formed the springboard from which Milhazes began to explore the vernaculars of local Brazilian culture. She examined the country’s colonial past, looking at baroque architecture as well as clothing and jewellery from the period. She recalled her maternal grandmother’s embrace of crochet, embroidery and traditional fabrics, as well as her paternal grandmother’s love of contemporary fashion and Carmen Miranda. She immersed herself anew in the country’s natural flora and fauna: from its dazzling blue coastlines, to sea creatures studied under microscopes and the botanic gardens that lay just beyond her studio walls. In the present work, intricate studies of fruits evoke the works of Dutch painter Albert Eckhout, who travelled through Brazil in the seventeenth century. At the heart of her practice, the carnival has remained a touchstone: ‘its wildness and freedom—it’s fascinating!’, she has explained. ‘... I’m actually a conceptual carnavalesca’ (B. Milhazes, quoted in D. Ebony, ‘Conceptual Carnavalesca’, Art in America, March 2015, p. 132).
With examples held in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, the works from the turn of the millennium marked an important new chapter in Milhazes’ practice. Defined by bright, electric hues, their profusions of starbursts, floral shapes, hearts and mandala-like forms gave rise to a kind of Pop-inflected nostalgia, calling to mind the paintings of Jasper Johns and others. Their increasingly hard-edge geometries, meanwhile, owed much to her newfound admiration for Bridget Riley: Milhazes attended her retrospective at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 2000, and left proclaiming that ‘all of her paintings, together, give rise to a samba!’ (B. Milhazes, quoted in H. W. Holzwarth (ed.), Beatriz Milhazes, Cologne 2021, p. 483). On the back of successful solo debuts in America and Europe, it was a period of great professional triumph for the artist. 2000 saw her first major public commission for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, followed the next year by her first UK institutional presentation at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
For all their teeming energy, Milhazes’ works are born of a quiet, contemplative process. Standing in front of a blank canvas, the artist mentally maps out her composition: ‘at this point, one may make everything and anything,’ she explains. ‘The canvas is a whole new world opening up’ (B. Milhazes, quoted in conversation with K. White, Artnet News, 11 April 2022). Frequently working in silence, she carefully paints her forms and motifs onto sheets of plastic, which are transferred onto the canvas paint side down, gradually coalescing and overlapping in the manner of a collage. The process, which resembles printing, gives rise to saturated colours and unpredictable finishes, riddled with inconsistencies that lend depth and texture to the work. Here, these qualities work in counterpoint with the painting’s crisp intersecting geometries, imbuing it with a sense of its own lived history.
Milhazes came of age during the 1980s, at a critical moment in painting’s history. The spirit of Brazil’s so-called ‘Geração Oitenta’ (‘80s Generation’) was matched by the rise of Neo-Expressionism in Europe and North America, both proposing a return to the visceral pleasures of pigment. As a student at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro, Milhazes plunged deep into the medium’s histories. She admired Brazilian avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s, including Neo-Concretism and Tropicália, as well as the works of Tarsila do Amaral. In 1985, she took her first trip to Europe, where she encountered important examples of Fauvism and Op Art in the flesh. She was particularly inspired by the works of Henri Matisse, which offered her a model for combining ornamental, decorative languages with rigorous abstract principles. She would later discover the work of Sonia Delaunay, whose influence resounds in the present painting’s interlocking concentric circles and diagonal planes.
These international lessons in abstraction formed the springboard from which Milhazes began to explore the vernaculars of local Brazilian culture. She examined the country’s colonial past, looking at baroque architecture as well as clothing and jewellery from the period. She recalled her maternal grandmother’s embrace of crochet, embroidery and traditional fabrics, as well as her paternal grandmother’s love of contemporary fashion and Carmen Miranda. She immersed herself anew in the country’s natural flora and fauna: from its dazzling blue coastlines, to sea creatures studied under microscopes and the botanic gardens that lay just beyond her studio walls. In the present work, intricate studies of fruits evoke the works of Dutch painter Albert Eckhout, who travelled through Brazil in the seventeenth century. At the heart of her practice, the carnival has remained a touchstone: ‘its wildness and freedom—it’s fascinating!’, she has explained. ‘... I’m actually a conceptual carnavalesca’ (B. Milhazes, quoted in D. Ebony, ‘Conceptual Carnavalesca’, Art in America, March 2015, p. 132).
With examples held in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, the works from the turn of the millennium marked an important new chapter in Milhazes’ practice. Defined by bright, electric hues, their profusions of starbursts, floral shapes, hearts and mandala-like forms gave rise to a kind of Pop-inflected nostalgia, calling to mind the paintings of Jasper Johns and others. Their increasingly hard-edge geometries, meanwhile, owed much to her newfound admiration for Bridget Riley: Milhazes attended her retrospective at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York in 2000, and left proclaiming that ‘all of her paintings, together, give rise to a samba!’ (B. Milhazes, quoted in H. W. Holzwarth (ed.), Beatriz Milhazes, Cologne 2021, p. 483). On the back of successful solo debuts in America and Europe, it was a period of great professional triumph for the artist. 2000 saw her first major public commission for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, followed the next year by her first UK institutional presentation at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.
For all their teeming energy, Milhazes’ works are born of a quiet, contemplative process. Standing in front of a blank canvas, the artist mentally maps out her composition: ‘at this point, one may make everything and anything,’ she explains. ‘The canvas is a whole new world opening up’ (B. Milhazes, quoted in conversation with K. White, Artnet News, 11 April 2022). Frequently working in silence, she carefully paints her forms and motifs onto sheets of plastic, which are transferred onto the canvas paint side down, gradually coalescing and overlapping in the manner of a collage. The process, which resembles printing, gives rise to saturated colours and unpredictable finishes, riddled with inconsistencies that lend depth and texture to the work. Here, these qualities work in counterpoint with the painting’s crisp intersecting geometries, imbuing it with a sense of its own lived history.