Beatriz Milhazes is the most relevant Brazilian artist investigating colour in the expanded field of painting today and, in her work, she breaks the limits between abstract and figurative, high and low art. Milhazes’s five large-scale paintings, specially created for the Applied Arts Pavilion, refer to the palette and patterns of a variety of traditional woven textiles from different cultures, many of which are displayed in the gallery. For Milhazes, their complex structures create “an incredible source of motifs” based on the human observation of nature’s inner regularity. In Memórias do Futuro I, her own repertoire of targets, rays, waves, and florals intersects with the hues and patterns appropriated from these textiles. Spectacular colour clusters are made up of short brushstrokes on monoprint colour fields. These vibrant compositions result from an underlying grid and calculated decisions, mirroring the intricacy of the knots in the monumental tapestry featured in the Pavilion. Its title, Pindorama (2020–2022), is the Tupi-Guarani peoples’ word for the Brazilian territory before colonisation.
Beatriz Milhazes represented Brazil at Biennale Arte in 2003.
—Luiza Interlenghi
