Gallery Max Hetzler is pleased to present new paintings by Beatriz Milhazes. Here again, the central vital motif, both formally and in terms of colour, is the flower. Its potential to create endless forms and colours, its growth and the inherent principle of repetition, is the role model for the paintings of the Brazilian artist.
The clichés of Hispanic culture – carnival, Samba, joie de vivre resonate – are unobtrusively merged with symbols and thoughts of other times and cultures. Thus Milhazes achieves the coalescence of stylistic opposites and atmospheric ambivalences and creates "an overwhelming and seemingly irrational vitality"*.
Her flowers undergo endless variations. One moment they are naturalistically painted, another moment they are abstractly transformed or only graphically suggested. While blossoms, flowers, circles, and coloured balls spill out of a visual centre, a seemingly inexhaustible variety and colourfulness fan out over the canvas. The flowers also enter numerous levels of visual depth. Parts of geometric or linear forms - like stripes, squares and rectangles - are closely interwoven, acting mostly as a background which itself is overlaid by other objects and forms, such as rings or flowers.
The diverse patterns that cover the paintings should not be considered the subject but rather the medium of the works. The swirling arches and arabesques of blossoms, bows and balls visually refer to each other and let the eye circle around the image. The occasionally emerging objects, that are in most cases feminine and/or religious, for example pearls that can also be seen as rosaries, lose their reference through repetition and become just form.
Similarly, the technique of the painter is focused on a harmony of single parts. Instead of canvas she paints the motifs onto glass or plastic foil. When it has dried she peels the motif off and applies it onto a canvas which is prepared with background colour and compositional sketches. Although the collage never denies its character, the final painting reaches a great balance and unity in composition.
The titles that Beatriz Milhazes gives her paintings are notably figurative, even narrative from time to time, though a connection to the images is generally difficult to find. They seem to offer the viewer a context for the moods and passion of the paintings. In terms of music, which is important to Milhazes' work, you could say that the titles set the scene in which to perceive these operas of paintings.
This is the first solo exhibition of Beatriz Milhazes in Germany. The artist (born 1960) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Since the mid 90s her work has been increasingly shown in an international context, for example the Tate Liverpool, the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Musee d'Art Moderne, Paris, as well as the Biennale of Sydney and Sao Paulo. This year she will be showing her paintings at the Venice Biennale in the Brazilian Pavilion.
For further information please contact the gallery at 030 229 24 37. Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.
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* Barry Schwabsky. Found in: Beatriz Milhazes, Mares do Sul, Exh. cat. Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil. Rio de Janeiro 2002. p 123.
