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Lot Essay
In 1985, Beatriz Milhazes spent three months in Europe. It was her first trip outside Brazil, and had a transformative impact on her art. She wandered the halls of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; she travelled to Paris, where she saw the works of Piet Mondrian and the Fauves in the flesh. It was her encounter with the work of Henri Matisse, however, that would prove most influential. ‘Everything changed the first time I saw a painting by Matisse,’ she explained. ‘It was a very emotional experience to see the materials, the colours, the format’ (quoted in Beatriz Milhazes: Pinturas e Colagens, exh. cat., Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2008, n.p.).
For four decades, Milhazes’ practice has flourished at the intersection of cultures. At the heart of her work is a love letter to her native Rio de Janeiro: its history, its architecture, its nature, music and fashion. The intoxicating colours of the city’s carnival jostle with references to the Brazilian avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s, including Neo-Concretism and the works of Tarsila do Amaral. The rhythms of Tropicália and Bossa Nova combine with patterns inspired by traditional fabrics. The legacies of European Modernism, however, are ever present. From Matisse she learnt how to combine decorative motifs with rigorous abstract structures. From Sonia Delaunay she learnt about tempo and form. In the work of Bridget Riley, she found parallels with Latin American dance: ‘all of her paintings, together,’ she proclaimed, ‘give rise to a samba!’ (quoted in H. W. Holzwarth, ed., Beatriz Milhazes, Cologne, 2021, p. 483).
Milhazes studied at Rio’s Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. She came of age as part of Brazil’s so-called ‘Geração Oitenta’ (‘80s Generation’), which—contemporaneous with the rise of Neo-Expressionism in Europe and North America—was defined by a desire to return to painting. Milhazes, for her part, developed a unique transfer technique that was perfectly suited to her multi-layered vocabulary. Beginning in 1989, she would paint motifs onto plastic sheets and leave them to dry. She would then glue the motif paint side down to the canvas, before finally peeling off the plastic. More detailed patterns were added later by hand. This intricate process allowed Milhazes to combine and overlay different forms in a manner that reflected her diverse influences. It also produced intense, saturated colours and unpredictable, abraded textures, lending each work a sense of temporal depth.
O mar (1996) and O rapaz (1993) are important early examples of this technique. Both were included in Milhazes’ 2023 exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate and Tate St Ives: her first solo show in a UK institution for over two decades. O mar translates as ‘the sea’: a key source of inspiration for Milhazes. The artist has spoken of her love for Rio’s glittering blue coastline, and is fascinated by local marine wildlife. Nature, more broadly, infiltrates every aspect of her practice. Since 1987 she has worked in a studio overlooking the city’s botanic gardens, surrounded by palm trees, tropical plants, monkeys and birds, as well as the nearby Atlantic Forest. Floral motifs, inspired early on by her love of Frida Kahlo, proliferate across her canvases of this period. O mar features delicate blue petals combined with compass-drawn flowers, while O rapaz calls to mind the biomorphic forms of Georgia O’Keeffe, bedecked with roses, fruits and berries.
Both works also bear witness to Milhazes’ interest in the Baroque: an influence that became particularly pronounced in the early 1990s. ‘The Baroque is in my blood, in my deepest culture,’ she has explained. ‘I spent most of my holidays with my parents going to Paraty, a small colonial town with wonderful Baroque churches … All the elaborate and detailed architecture and the devotion to gold and celebration, all these elements have always fascinated me … Hispanic culture in general, from art to architecture, especially the Catholic church, and women’s royal costumes … even the carnival references had a kind of poetic atmosphere that related to that’ (ibid., p. 331). O mar, in particular, demonstrates the rich palette of gold, dark blues, opulent purples and deep greens that would come to define Milhazes’ engagement with this vernacular. In both paintings, ruffles, beadwork, gilded rosettes, arabesques and filigree sprawl across the surface like lace. Many carry more personal connotations, evoking the traditional embroidery and crochet techniques that Milhazes encountered through her grandmother.
O mar and O rapaz stem from an important juncture in Milhazes’ career: others from this period are held in institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama and the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio. 1993 saw her first international solo exhibition at the Sala Alternativa Artes Visuales in Caracas. In 1995 she participated in the Carnegie International, followed swiftly by her first solo exhibitions in New York and Europe. 2003 marked a turning point, with her work featuring in the Brazilian Pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale. Over the next few years she would go on to mount important exhibitions at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo—her first major solo show in a Brazilian Museum—and the Fondation Cartier, Paris in 2009. More recently, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) organised a large-scale retrospective in 2020-2021. Milhazes participated in the Venice Biennale of 2024, and in March 2025, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York presented Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty, the first solo show of a Brazilian artist in the institution.
Brinquedos populares (2009-2010) demonstrates some of the directions in which Milhazes’ visual language evolved throughout this period of mounting critical acclaim. She was increasingly guided by a concept she termed ‘chromatic free geometry’, balancing quiet, careful compositional planning with freewheeling, intuitive spontaneity. Circles became integral to this approach, offering Milhazes a clear, structured form that was simultaneously full of life and motion. ‘They are connected to the breath and speed of the forests, flowers, leaves, animal shapes, the power of the waves, water, oceans, the Earth’s rotation, the Sun, the Moon, day, night, sky, light,’ she explains (in conversation with P. Apfelbaum, 14 June 2022, Pace Gallery, online). In Brinquedos populares, they seem to refract and multiply across the surface, creating a dizzying sense of flux. The work also demonstrates the heightened colours that Milhazes embraced during these years, with their vivid, pop-inflected tones. ‘Colour is what makes everything happen,’ she notes. ‘… Colour gives balance, harmony, structure. It’s life and nature. It is pure sensibility, poetry, imagination, abstraction, and joy’ (ibid.).
During this period Milhazes would also continue to explore collage. Initially deployed as a means of planning her paintings, the medium took on a life of its own in her practice in 2003. At a residency in Brittany that year, she had begun experimenting with salvaged wrappers from sweets and chocolates which she had bought as gifts for staff members. Over the years she would go on to utilise various materials accumulated during her daily life and travels, including packaging, tissue and hologrammed and silkscreened papers. This important strain of her practice, which the artist views as kind of personal diary, is represented in the collection by O passeio (2014), offered in the Day Sale.
In weaving together diverse cultural influences, Milhazes has been deeply conscious of Brazil’s colonial past. Throughout her work, however, she reclaims this heritage on her own terms. ‘[The curator] Ivo Mesquita once said that the most Brazilian aspect in my work is the freedom of putting together all different elements and creating my own context without fear,’ she explains. ‘I think one of the greatest things we have in our cultural mix is the feeling of freedom. I believe this feeling opened me up to find my way as an artist, as a painter, to develop my own artistic language in a global context. I had this ambition of becoming a painter in a country that doesn’t have a tradition of painting and I became a painter, an international one’ (quoted in H. W. Holzwarth, op. cit., p. 332). This liberated conviction is reflected throughout this extraordinary group of works. It is thrilling testament to an artist unafraid of crossing borders, and bold enough to take on the world.
For four decades, Milhazes’ practice has flourished at the intersection of cultures. At the heart of her work is a love letter to her native Rio de Janeiro: its history, its architecture, its nature, music and fashion. The intoxicating colours of the city’s carnival jostle with references to the Brazilian avant-garde movements of the 1950s and 1960s, including Neo-Concretism and the works of Tarsila do Amaral. The rhythms of Tropicália and Bossa Nova combine with patterns inspired by traditional fabrics. The legacies of European Modernism, however, are ever present. From Matisse she learnt how to combine decorative motifs with rigorous abstract structures. From Sonia Delaunay she learnt about tempo and form. In the work of Bridget Riley, she found parallels with Latin American dance: ‘all of her paintings, together,’ she proclaimed, ‘give rise to a samba!’ (quoted in H. W. Holzwarth, ed., Beatriz Milhazes, Cologne, 2021, p. 483).
Milhazes studied at Rio’s Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage. She came of age as part of Brazil’s so-called ‘Geração Oitenta’ (‘80s Generation’), which—contemporaneous with the rise of Neo-Expressionism in Europe and North America—was defined by a desire to return to painting. Milhazes, for her part, developed a unique transfer technique that was perfectly suited to her multi-layered vocabulary. Beginning in 1989, she would paint motifs onto plastic sheets and leave them to dry. She would then glue the motif paint side down to the canvas, before finally peeling off the plastic. More detailed patterns were added later by hand. This intricate process allowed Milhazes to combine and overlay different forms in a manner that reflected her diverse influences. It also produced intense, saturated colours and unpredictable, abraded textures, lending each work a sense of temporal depth.
O mar (1996) and O rapaz (1993) are important early examples of this technique. Both were included in Milhazes’ 2023 exhibition at Turner Contemporary, Margate and Tate St Ives: her first solo show in a UK institution for over two decades. O mar translates as ‘the sea’: a key source of inspiration for Milhazes. The artist has spoken of her love for Rio’s glittering blue coastline, and is fascinated by local marine wildlife. Nature, more broadly, infiltrates every aspect of her practice. Since 1987 she has worked in a studio overlooking the city’s botanic gardens, surrounded by palm trees, tropical plants, monkeys and birds, as well as the nearby Atlantic Forest. Floral motifs, inspired early on by her love of Frida Kahlo, proliferate across her canvases of this period. O mar features delicate blue petals combined with compass-drawn flowers, while O rapaz calls to mind the biomorphic forms of Georgia O’Keeffe, bedecked with roses, fruits and berries.
Both works also bear witness to Milhazes’ interest in the Baroque: an influence that became particularly pronounced in the early 1990s. ‘The Baroque is in my blood, in my deepest culture,’ she has explained. ‘I spent most of my holidays with my parents going to Paraty, a small colonial town with wonderful Baroque churches … All the elaborate and detailed architecture and the devotion to gold and celebration, all these elements have always fascinated me … Hispanic culture in general, from art to architecture, especially the Catholic church, and women’s royal costumes … even the carnival references had a kind of poetic atmosphere that related to that’ (ibid., p. 331). O mar, in particular, demonstrates the rich palette of gold, dark blues, opulent purples and deep greens that would come to define Milhazes’ engagement with this vernacular. In both paintings, ruffles, beadwork, gilded rosettes, arabesques and filigree sprawl across the surface like lace. Many carry more personal connotations, evoking the traditional embroidery and crochet techniques that Milhazes encountered through her grandmother.
O mar and O rapaz stem from an important juncture in Milhazes’ career: others from this period are held in institutional collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama and the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, Rio. 1993 saw her first international solo exhibition at the Sala Alternativa Artes Visuales in Caracas. In 1995 she participated in the Carnegie International, followed swiftly by her first solo exhibitions in New York and Europe. 2003 marked a turning point, with her work featuring in the Brazilian Pavilion at that year’s Venice Biennale. Over the next few years she would go on to mount important exhibitions at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo—her first major solo show in a Brazilian Museum—and the Fondation Cartier, Paris in 2009. More recently, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) organised a large-scale retrospective in 2020-2021. Milhazes participated in the Venice Biennale of 2024, and in March 2025, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York presented Beatriz Milhazes: Rigor and Beauty, the first solo show of a Brazilian artist in the institution.
Brinquedos populares (2009-2010) demonstrates some of the directions in which Milhazes’ visual language evolved throughout this period of mounting critical acclaim. She was increasingly guided by a concept she termed ‘chromatic free geometry’, balancing quiet, careful compositional planning with freewheeling, intuitive spontaneity. Circles became integral to this approach, offering Milhazes a clear, structured form that was simultaneously full of life and motion. ‘They are connected to the breath and speed of the forests, flowers, leaves, animal shapes, the power of the waves, water, oceans, the Earth’s rotation, the Sun, the Moon, day, night, sky, light,’ she explains (in conversation with P. Apfelbaum, 14 June 2022, Pace Gallery, online). In Brinquedos populares, they seem to refract and multiply across the surface, creating a dizzying sense of flux. The work also demonstrates the heightened colours that Milhazes embraced during these years, with their vivid, pop-inflected tones. ‘Colour is what makes everything happen,’ she notes. ‘… Colour gives balance, harmony, structure. It’s life and nature. It is pure sensibility, poetry, imagination, abstraction, and joy’ (ibid.).
During this period Milhazes would also continue to explore collage. Initially deployed as a means of planning her paintings, the medium took on a life of its own in her practice in 2003. At a residency in Brittany that year, she had begun experimenting with salvaged wrappers from sweets and chocolates which she had bought as gifts for staff members. Over the years she would go on to utilise various materials accumulated during her daily life and travels, including packaging, tissue and hologrammed and silkscreened papers. This important strain of her practice, which the artist views as kind of personal diary, is represented in the collection by O passeio (2014), offered in the Day Sale.
In weaving together diverse cultural influences, Milhazes has been deeply conscious of Brazil’s colonial past. Throughout her work, however, she reclaims this heritage on her own terms. ‘[The curator] Ivo Mesquita once said that the most Brazilian aspect in my work is the freedom of putting together all different elements and creating my own context without fear,’ she explains. ‘I think one of the greatest things we have in our cultural mix is the feeling of freedom. I believe this feeling opened me up to find my way as an artist, as a painter, to develop my own artistic language in a global context. I had this ambition of becoming a painter in a country that doesn’t have a tradition of painting and I became a painter, an international one’ (quoted in H. W. Holzwarth, op. cit., p. 332). This liberated conviction is reflected throughout this extraordinary group of works. It is thrilling testament to an artist unafraid of crossing borders, and bold enough to take on the world.