Beatriz Milhazes Exhibition

James Cohan Gallery

poster for Beatriz Milhazes Exhibition

This event has ended.

As one of the most celebrated Brazilian artists working today, Milhazes' exuberantly-colored and rhythmically-constructed abstract paintings, collages, prints and architectural installations are well-known worldwide. Milhazes merges all of the formal concerns inherent in abstract painting with a dizzying hybrid of influences that bounce off of each other to produce works in which, as the artist describes, "culture eats culture." In her attempt to make the viewer's eye "spin around," Milhazes deftly uses images as a distribution system for color.

In her third solo exhibition at the gallery, Milhazes will present a selection of collages and paintings. In the past, the paintings have been the inspiration for the artist's other endeavors, such as her collages made from chocolate candy wrappers, shopping bags and colored paper and her installations on building façades. In this latest body of work, however, the reverse is true; the paintings, whose surfaces are built-up from an elaborate process of transferring motifs painted on plastic sheet, are increasingly influenced by the immediacy of working with small bits of paper and the bold strokes of large-scale architecture. This shift, as well as a deepening involvement in nature — the artist's Rio de Janeiro studio borders her beloved Botanic Gardens — has influenced Milhazes' new work, making it even more rigorously structured with broader fields of color and new elements derived from abstractions of natural and architectural forms.

Not afraid to gather inspiration from sources such as Brazilian folk arts and decoration, Milhazes embraces these "low" art influences and balances them with the high-minded modernism brought to Latin America by an earlier generation of artists, such as Helio Oticica and Tarsila do Amaral. Mix in the rhythms and grooves of Tropicalismo, the spectacle of color that is Carnival and the over-the-top ornamentation of the Colonial Baroque and the paintings exemplify "anything goes"—an apt phrase coined by the Neo-Concrete artist Waldemar Coreiro in the 1960's. As Paolo Herkenhoff explains in his catalogue essay for Milhazes' exhibition Mares do Sul, rather than trying to create a destabilizing effect, "Milhazes aspires to encountering harmony in the absurd, her painting not being the collapse of order but that moment that follows vertigo."

[Image: Beatriz Milhazes "Yogurt" (2008) Mixed-media collage on paper 185.5 x 141 cm Photographer: Fausto Fleury, RJ]

Media

Schedule

from October 10, 2008 to November 15, 2008

Opening Reception on 2008-10-10 from 18:00 to 20:00

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    Alex Callender tablog review

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