Author Description

Beatriz Milhazes is a central artist in Brazilian contemporary art, in the panorama of international painting and in the recent history of abstraction. Milhazes works with a complex repertoire of images associated with different motives, origins and sources, primarily in painting, but also in engraving, collage, drawing, sculpture and textiles. With more than 170 works distributed between the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) and Itaú Cultural, the exhibition spans the 30 years of Milhazes' artistic trayectory. Her compositions are intricate, dense, multicolored and literally filled with layers - of colors, paints, papers and meanings. The sources are diverse and plural - from modernism to baroque, from the so-called popular art to pop culture, from fashion to jewelry, from the very history of art to nature, from architecture to abstraction. This book accompanies the largest exhibition dedicated to the artist's work, Beatriz Milhazes: Avenida Paulista. Its title refers to the name of the avenue on which the two institutions that co-organize the project are located: the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand and Itaú Cultural. The publication, in hardcover with silkscreen, is richly illustrated, with four distinct covers, two types of papers, covering the artist's production from 1989 to 2020, in addition to having nine unpublished texts on her work, covering multiple aspects of her production. It is an indispensable book for anyone who follows or wants to know the work of Beatriz Milhazes, one of the most significant artists on the Brazilian and international scene in the 21st century. The exhibition included works made since 1989, a tipping point in the trajectory of Milhazes. It was in that year that she developed the technique she called monotransfer, in which she paints on a transparent plastic sheet and then decalca or transfers the painted and dry element to the canvas (one of these sheets is exposed in the showcase in the first basement). The title of th