Beatriz Milhazes: Biography and Work: Introduction and Early Career

Her work is celebrated internationally and has been exhibited in major museums worldwide.

Milhazes is regarded as one of the most significant artists in contemporary Brazilian art, and her works are prized for their visual energy and the complexity of their compositions.

Beatriz Milhazes is a prominent Brazilian visual artist and currently the most highly valued. Her structural repertoire includes geometric abstraction, Carnival, and modernism.

Beatriz Ferreira Milhazes was born on March 18, 1960, in Rio de Janeiro.

She began her career in the early 1980s, the year she enrolled at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro.

During this period, the artist participated in exhibitions characteristic of the Generation 80 movement. Engaging in research of new techniques and materials, she was part of a group of artists aiming to revive painting, contrasting with the conceptual trend of the 70s.

It was only from 1990 onwards that Beatriz began to stand out in international exhibitions in the United States and Europe, joining the collections of museums such as the MoMa, Guggenheim, and Metropolitan in New York.

Journey and Work

Beatriz Milhazes grew up under Brazil's former military dictatorship, without access to the dominant art world. While her country had boasted an avant-garde art scene since the 1930s, opportunities for young artists were limited in the early 80s when she embarked on her career. At that time, Latin American collectors typically focused on works from past eras. “We had no voice,” Milhazes recalled about her peers from that period.

For a young painter eager to see the work of 20th-century masters like Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse, the situation was particularly bleak. She began painting with acrylic on plastic sheets, working motif by motif, creating each image in reverse, as if making a print. When she developed this method in the late 80s, she declared: “This opened a huge door for me.”

That door opened further in 1992 when Brazilian curator and critic Paulo Herkenhoff brought three Americans to Milhazes' studio: Richard Armstrong, then curator at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh and now director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York; Madeleine Grynsztejn, then curator at the Art Institute of Chicago and current director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; and Fred Henry, president of the Bohen Foundation, a non-profit group that commissions new artworks.

Fred Henry soon became a dedicated collector, and Armstrong eventually invited Milhazes to participate in the 1995 Carnegie International. “That was the opening,” she said. Through the Carnegie, she met New York dealer Edward Thorp, who began showing her work in SoHo the following year. Her career quickly gained international traction.

To understand the rest of this journey, continue with our next article: Beatriz Milhazes: Biography and Work: Style, Influences, and Global Recognition.

Surprisingly, she spent over 4 years working under almost suffocating conditions.