BEATRIZ MILHAZES

The show, titled Beatriz Milhazes: Mistura Sagrada, will spotlight ten vibrant, large-scale paintings created in 2021 and 2022, as well as a large-scale mobile sculpture. The works in this show exemplify Milhazes’s uncanny ability to forge dynamic, unified choreographies with seemingly disparate elements, patterns, and hues. The layered compositions resulting from these formal investigations possess a kinetic quality, unfolding and reforming over time. The presentation marks Milhazes’s first solo exhibition with Pace since she joined the gallery in 2020 and her first show in New York in nearly a decade. Pace Publishing will produce a catalogue on the occasion of the exhibition.

Drawing inspiration from European Modernism, Baroque decorative arts, the Brazilian Antropofagia movement, and other art historical sources, Milhazes is known for conjuring energetic plays of colour and form in her paintings, collages, prints, and installations.

Her use of colour and geometry is mined from place—the botanical gardens and the Tijuca forest near her studio, the surrounding city of Rio de Janeiro, its ocean front, and the cultural motifs of Brazil—and memory. This process culminates in the artist’s patented form of abstraction, which she has termed ‘chromatic free geometry.’

‘Creating spaces to develop my thoughts and explore complex orders and conceptual systems gives me pleasure. I enjoy being surrounded by a circuit of affections,’ the artist says. ‘Geometry gives structure to my sensibility. It turns into diagonals, patterns, textures, motifs, and forms. My access to a diversity of tools creates a chromatic joy and a poetic bow.’

The paintings in Milhazes’s exhibition with Pace in New York—which range from five to over nine feet wide— consolidate her return to figuration, which she resumed in 2017. The artist has filled the works in the show with imagery of the natural world, from flowers, trees, and totems to suns and stars. Notably, the titles of these poetic works directly reference their contents, drawing viewers into magical, generative, natural worlds.