Beatriz Milhazes

This is the most comprehensive book to date on Beatriz Milhazes, featuring many previously unpublished paintings and prints. Milhazes, a pivotal figure in contemporary art and the history of abstraction, works with a complex repertoire of images associated with different motifs, origins and sources. She works mainly in painting, printmaking and collage, but also in drawing, sculpture, artist’s books and textiles, among other mediums. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, geometry and free form, her compositions are intricate, dense, multicolored and literally full of layers—of colors, paints, papers and meanings. Milhazes’ sources are diverse and varied: from modernism to the Baroque, from folk art or "arte popular" to pop culture, from fashion to jewelry, from architecture to abstraction, from the history of art to nature. Her work encompasses multiple references, including the artists Hilma af Klint, Sonia Delaunay, Bridget Riley, Henri Matisse, Tarsila do Amaral and Piet Mondrian.
Beatriz Milhazes: Avenida Paulista includes more than 170 works made since 1989, a turning point in Milhazes’ career. It was in that year that she developed the technique she calls “monotransfer,” in which she paints on a sheet of transparent plastic and then decals or transfers the painted and dry element to the canvas. The book provides a unique opportunity to discover her diverse, complex, multifaceted and singular work.
Beatriz Milhazes was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960. Her works can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim, MASP, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, Tate and the Centre Pompidou, among others. Milhazes lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

This is the first book on the collages of Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes (born 1960). During a residency in Brittany, in 2003, Milhazes offered chocolates and sweets to the art center team, asking them to return the wrapping papers afterward. From these the artist commenced a new project: her collages. Until this point, Milhazes had considered collage a secondary activity, a way of drafting her paintings. With time, her collage technique developed along its own path.

“Collages have a kind of dialogue with an imaginary journal,” she writes. “Collected papers come from a variety of interests: sometimes it’s an aesthetic attraction, but other times they’re part of a routine, such as with chocolate wrapping paper or cuttings remaining from existing impressions. That’s why composition in collage creates a dialogue that’s exclusive to collages.” As Frédéric Paul, the book’s editor, observes, by using disposable ingredients in her collages, Milhazes emphasizes the acceleration of cycles of taste. “The frivolity of sweets and shopping express the frivolous versatility of trend indicators. They are also, surely, an expression of the assumed decorative frivolity. Milhazes’s work has the extraordinary complexity of simple things and faces us with a breathtaking plastic evidence.”