From September 30 , 2021 to November 28,2021, the Long Museum (West Bund) is pleased to present ‘Beatriz Milhazes: Ballet em Diagonais’, the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes’s first solo museum exhibition in China.

The exhibition features recent paintings, collages and sculptures, alongside a site-specific installation on the window of the Long Museum. Using transparent vinyl, Milhazes has created a collage applied directly to the glass. Similar to a stained-glass window, in daylight the work casts a dazzling array of coloured shapes across the museum’s interior space.

The work of Beatriz Milhazes is characterised by vibrant colour, optical play and energetic visual rhythms. Working in a wide range of mediums, Beatriz Milhazes’unique form of abstraction fuses a diverse array of shapes, images, patterns and colours to make densely layered and complex works which combine elements from the natural world, her native Brazilian culture as well as a long tradition of European abstraction.

‘Beatriz Milhazes: Ballet em Diagonais’ provides a comprehensive overview of Milhazes’ expansive practice. For her paintings, Milhazes uses a decal technique whereby shapes are painted onto sheets of plastic which, when dry, are then peeled off and transferred to the canvas. This method of production allows the artist to work with a smooth surface which nonetheless reveals the process of its own construction. At times the paint remains stuck to the plastic and rips, and these torn and exposed elements introduce points of erosion which give the impression that the final artwork is the result of multiple layers of time collapsed into a single image.

In her collages Milhazes uses a wide range of materials, including found papers, confectionary wrappers, designer labels with specially printed serigraphic paper and fragments of her own screen-prints. This wide variety of source material is the means by which Milhazes explores form and colour, concerns that are also addressed in the hanging sculptures composed of colourful objects strung on fine vertical threads, cascading down from ceiling to floor and responding to the movement of the audience.

About the Artist

Beatriz Milhazes was born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro where she lives and works. She has had numerous solo exhibitions including Museum of Art, São Paulo and Itaú Cultural, São Paulo (2020); Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2015); Centro Cultural Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (2013); Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brazil (2013); Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2012); Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (2012); Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland (2011); Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris (2009); and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2008). In 2003 she represented Brazil at the 50th Venice Biennale.