[4] As a painter, Beatriz Milhazes uses a unique transfer technique, first painting on plastic sheets before peeling away the dried shapes and collaging them onto the canvas.

For these paintings, as well as her collages, prints, and installations, Milhazes draws on a wide range of aesthetic traditions, including folk and decorative art, European modernism, and Antropofagia, a movement founded in the late 1920s that proposed “cannibalizing” the supposedly high-minded European traditions to create a distinctly Brazilian Culture.

[5] Figurehead of the 80’s Generation, period of the Brazilian art characterized by the return of young artists to painting, Beatriz Milhazes still lives in Rio, where she was born in 1960.

[6][4] Milhazes is represented by Pace Gallery, New York; Galeria Fortes D’Aloia e Gabriel, Sao Paulo; Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin; and White Cube, London.

[8] These references, apparent in many of the vibrant colours and shapes, are often associated with the very poorest part of the population and are generally thought to be of little interest to the upper classes or intellectuals.

[8] Her installation Gamboa II, for instance, was strongly influenced by the carnival in her native country Brazil which includes dance, costumes and parades.

Drawing from the optical reactions provoked by artists like Bridget Riley and Tarsila do Amaral, Milhazes believes that art is an essential way for people to aestheticize and exteriorize their thoughts and feelings.

Filled with intense colors and shapes, her work serves to inspire a strong dialogue as well as “challenging eye movements over easy beauty.”[9] Milhazes also draws her influences from many other female artists such as Sonia Delaunay, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Elizabeth Murray.

[1] Her 2000 painting "Meu Limão" "sold [in 2012] for $2.1 million dollars at Sotheby's in New York City, making her the highest-priced living Brazilian artist at auction.

[15] The cultural mixing of her native Brazil is something Milhazes is aware of and to some degree communicates in her paintings as well as being in ties with the Brazilian modernist movement.

[1] Inspired by late Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, artist Beatriz Milhazes created Gamboa II, an installation suspended from the ceiling at the Jewish Museum in NYC from May, 2016 to mid September, 2016.