Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs who think Latin American contemporary art is limited to Frida Kahlo and smiling skeletons! Your narrow view of the art world is as outdated as your Prada shirts from last season. And you have no excuse not to know Beatriz Milhazes, this Brazilian who has been exploding our traditional notions of abstraction for four decades.
Born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro, Milhazes never needed to leave her hometown to conquer the art world. Unlike all those artists who move to New York, Paris, or London to make a name for themselves, she chose to stay true to her roots, setting up her studio near Rio’s botanical garden. This choice is no accident. It is part of a coherent intellectual approach that runs through her entire work: integrating the visual richness of Brazil into the language of Western geometric abstraction. From this hybridization, she created something truly original, something that seizes your eyes and never lets go.
At the 2003 Venice Biennale, where Milhazes represented Brazil, her canvases appeared as controlled explosions of colors and circular forms, a kind of visual ritual possessing its own internal logic. Her work shakes up conventions, but without the cynical pose so common in contemporary art. Her works are joyful without being naive, complex without being pretentious, and above all, they do not apologize for being beautiful.
But make no mistake: beauty in Milhazes’ work is never gratuitous. It is the vehicle for a profound reflection on culture, history, and politics. As the philosopher Gaston Bachelard taught us, poetic images are not simply objects of passive contemplation but catalysts for thought. In his work The Poetics of Space, Bachelard writes that “the poetic image is not subject to a thrust. It is not the echo of a past. It is rather the opposite: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resonates with echoes” [1]. Milhazes’ canvases function exactly this way. They do not depict the Brazilian carnival, colonial baroque architecture, or the tropical forest; they evoke them through a vibrant abstraction that makes these cultural and natural references resonate in our consciousness.
Her “monotransfer” technique, developed in 1989, has become her signature. She first paints patterns on sheets of transparent plastic, then glues them onto the canvas and removes the plastic, leaving a paint imprint. It is a laborious and meticulous process that creates a paradoxical surface: both smooth and textured, planned and unpredictable. The layers accumulate like cultural sediments, each stratum carrying the memory of the previous ones. This method is a perfect metaphor for the identity-building process of Brazil, where different cultural influences, indigenous, European, African, have overlapped over the centuries.
In works like “Maresias” (2002) or “O Diamante” (2002), Milhazes achieves an impressive stylistic maturity. The concentric circles, which have become her trademark, spin like planets in a parallel cosmos. These circular forms are not mere decorative elements. They are what art critic Susan Sontag would call an “eroticism of art” rather than a “hermeneutics” [2]. They do not ask to be deciphered, but to be experienced in their sensory fullness.
Sontag, in her essay “Against Interpretation,” warns us against the tendency to reduce art to its intellectual content at the expense of its form. She writes: “Our task is not to find a maximum of content in a work of art, let alone to extract content greater than that which is already there. Our task is to reduce the content so that we can see the thing itself” [3]. Milhazes’s works perfectly resist this temptation of over-intellectualization. They exist primarily as intense visual experiences before being objects of analysis.
This is precisely what makes her work so subversive in the context of contemporary art. At a time when conceptual and minimalist art dominated the international scene, Milhazes dared to embrace color, pattern, and sensuality without hesitation. She is part of what is called the “Generation 80” in Brazil, those artists who emerged at the end of the military dictatorship and who claimed a return to painting and personal expression. Their collective exhibition in 1984, “Como vai você, Geração 80?” (How are you, Generation 80?), marked a turning point in Brazilian art.
This generation has often been criticized for its apparent political disengagement, accused of frivolous hedonism at a time when the country was emerging from two decades of oppression. But this is a superficial reading. As Milhazes herself stated: “I have been political all my life, but not always in an obvious way” [4]. Her commitment is manifested in her determination to create art that celebrates Brazilian cultural identity without falling into folklore or exoticism. She accomplishes the feat of appropriating Western visual languages while radically transforming them through the prism of her own culture.
This dialogue between different visual traditions is particularly evident in her more recent works, such as “Douradinha em cinza e marrom” (2016) or “Banho de Rio” (2017). Floral and organic motifs coexist with rigid geometric grids, creating a productive tension between nature and culture, chaos and order. These complex compositions remind us that the natural world is not the opposite of human civilization, but its foundation and condition of possibility.
In this, her work resonates deeply with Julia Kristeva’s ideas and her concept of intertextuality. In her book “Sèméiôtikè,” Kristeva develops the idea that every text (and by extension, every work of art) is a mosaic of quotations, an absorption and transformation of other texts [5]. Milhazes’s work perfectly illustrates this concept. She absorbs and transforms a multitude of visual references: the decorative motifs of Brazilian popular crafts, the arabesques of colonial baroque architecture, the geometric shapes of European modernism, the vibrant colors of the Rio carnival.
But unlike some postmodern artists who practice quotation with ironic detachment, Milhazes sincerely engages with her sources. She does not quote to deconstruct, but to build something new and authentic. Her relationship with tradition is one of respectful dialogue rather than provocative rupture. She acknowledges her debt to artists such as Tarsila do Amaral, a key figure of the Brazilian anthropophagic movement of the 1920s, who proposed “cannibalizing” European influences to create an authentically Brazilian art.
This “anthropophagic” approach is evident in the way Milhazes digests influences as diverse as Matisse, Mondrian, and Bridget Riley. She does not imitate them; she devours and transforms them. Take, for example, her installation “O Esplendor” (2023) for the Turner Contemporary in Margate, which evokes Matisse’s stained glass windows for the Vence chapel, but with a radically different palette and energy. Or her collages that incorporate candy wrappers and shopping bags, transforming these everyday consumer objects into compositions of refined elegance.
In fact, this ability to transcend traditional dichotomies, between high and low art, between abstraction and figuration, between the West and non-West, is what makes Milhazes’s work so relevant in our globalized world. She shows us that it is possible to create art that is both deeply rooted in a specific culture and universally accessible.
Art critic Kristeva reminds us that “poetry is only inspired mathematics” [6], a formula that could perfectly describe Milhazes’s work. There is indeed something mathematical in the rigor of her compositions, in the way she balances disparate elements to create a harmonious whole. But this mathematics is “inspired”; it vibrates with emotion, sensuality, and life.
Milhazes’s exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in 2023, titled “Maresias” (a Portuguese word meaning sea breeze), was particularly revealing in this respect. By placing her exuberant works in the austere context of the museum’s modernist architecture, facing the English North Sea rather than the tropical Atlantic, the exhibition created a striking contrast. But instead of appearing out of place, the works seemed to transform the space itself, infusing the environment with their vibrant energy.
Perhaps this is Milhazes’s greatest achievement: her ability to transform our perceptions, to make us see the world differently. As she herself declared: “I feel that I am like a scientist. It’s about experimenting with new things and challenging oneself” [7]. This experimental attitude, combined with impressive technical mastery and refined aesthetic sensitivity, makes her one of the most important artists of our time.
So yes, I affirm it without hesitation: Beatriz Milhazes is essential. She has achieved what few contemporary artists can claim: creating a truly original visual language that defies easy categories and simplistic interpretations. Her work reminds us that abstraction is not a universal and neutral language, but is always anchored in specific cultural and historical contexts. At the same time, she demonstrates that these specificities can become the basis of a visual dialogue that transcends borders.
In a world of art that is often cynical and disenchanted, Milhazes offers something rare: a sincere faith in the transformative power of beauty. Not a bland or decorative beauty, but a complex, vibrant, and meaningful beauty. A beauty that, as Kristeva said, “is not an ornament; it is what articulates the invisible” [8].
And if you still think that geometric abstraction is an exhausted visual language, unable to speak to us with freshness and relevance, then I invite you to spend time with Milhazes’s works. Let yourself be immersed in their circular rhythms, their exuberant colors, their dynamic tensions between order and chaos. You may discover that abstraction, in the hands of such an inspired artist, still has a lot to tell us about our world and about ourselves.
Because, at heart, that’s what it’s all about: Milhazes uses abstraction not as an end in itself, but as a means to explore what it means to be human, to be Brazilian, to be a female artist in a world still largely dominated by men. Her work reminds us that art does not need to be explicitly political to be deeply engaged with the realities of our time.
Perhaps it is the joy that emanates from her works that is their most radical quality. In an artistic landscape where somber seriousness is often confused with depth, Milhazes dares to suggest that joy and beauty can be just as deep and meaningful. And in a world facing so many crises, environmental, political, social, this joyful affirmation of life is not a refusal to face reality, but a necessary form of resistance.
As she herself said: “I am an optimist, and I want to show how much we need the breath of leaves, water, sky, and sun. My work speaks of life” [9]. And perhaps that is the greatest gift an artist can give us.
- Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1957.
- Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966.
- Ibid.
- Trigg, David. “Beatriz Milhazes, interview: ‘My big ambition is always to try to do something new with abstraction'”, Studio International, July 12, 2023.
- Kristeva, Julia. Semiotics: Research for a Semanalysis. Paris: Seuil, 1969.
- Kristeva, Julia. The Revolution of Poetic Language. Paris: Seuil, 1974.
- Pogrebin, Robin. “Beatriz Milhazes Breaks the Circle”, The New York Times, September 16, 2022.
- Kristeva, Julia. Histories of Love. Paris: Denoël, 1983.
- Sherwin, Skye. “‘We’ve done so much damage’: Beatriz Milhazes’s carnivalesque odes to nature”, The Guardian, May 18, 2023.
