Provenance:
Edward Thorp Gallery, New York (with label on verso);
Collection Martin Kunz, acquired from the above gallery in 1997.

Exhibition:
Edward Thorp Gallery, New York, Beatriz Milhazes: Recent Paintings, October 19 - November 25, 2000.

In Beatriz Milhazes’ oeuvre, organic forms in vibrant colours collide with rhythmic compositions featuring equally bright hues. The formal language of her flowers is reminiscent of mandalas, whose individual colour fields are clearly separated from each other and which intensify from the outside inwards.
Her work is inspired both by Brazilian modernism from the 1920s to 1940s and by various European artists such as Henri Matisse, Sonia Delaunay, and Piet Mondrian. Curator Michiko Kono notes that Milhazes values the endless freedom to draw inspiration from both European and North American art history, as well as from the art and culture of Brazil. The artist herself explains: "I recently discovered that freedom is a word that accurately describes my work. What characterizes my work, I think, is the freedom with which I combine concepts, paintings, colors, abstraction, and figuration, all within the framework of very rational and geometric painting. An ordered freedom."

Beatriz Milhazes works with a special painting technique she developed herself. She uses transparent sheets and paints them with colour. After the drying process, the painted side of the sheet is glued to the canvas. Typically, when the sheet is peeled away, paint residues often stick to it; fragments detach from the actually even layer of paint. Since the artist reuses the sheets multiple times and works with the same ones for up to ten years, pigment remnants frequently appear in other works. Her smooth paintings, with their stencil-like precision, thus acquire a characteristically irregular expression, evoking dynamism.

Beatriz Milhazes was born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro. In 2003, she represented Brazil at the Venice Biennale. Her works are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 2011, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel hosted her first solo exhibition in Switzerland.

¹ Michiko Kono. Geordnete Freiheit, in: Exhibition catalogue. Beatriz Milhazes. Fondation Beyeler, Basel 2011, page 38.
² Beatriz Milhazes, in: Exhibit. Cat. Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris 2009, page14.

We thank the Beatriz Milhazes Studio, Rio de Janeiro, for their support in cataloging the work.