Beatriz Milhazes at the Cartier Foundation
April 29, 2009
JP flew for a quick visit to Paris last month to join Beatriz Milhazes at the opening of her exhibition at the Cartier Foundation and by all accounts the exhibition is breathtaking. If you find yourself in Paris before June 21st, make sure to see the show!
“For the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, Milhazes presents a focused selection of large format acrylic paintings, chosen from her work of the past decade, as well as a monumental collage created especially for the show. She has also realized a monumental commission for the building’s glass facades. Her striking installations play with natural light to create a powerful visual dialogue with the architecture of Jean Nouvel and the surrounding garden.”
Here is a link to the Cartier Foundation’s website and here are a few snapshots of the installation. There are incredible videos of the collage being installed.
Also on exhibit last month was “Gamboa, 2008″, a stunning sculptural installation in iron and mixed media. 27.6 in tall x 45.7 in diameter. The piece which was originally made for Prospect.1 New Orleans Biennial and was on display at James Cohan Gallery last month. “Gamboa (2008) is chandelier-like mobile with suspended glittering ornaments. Recurring motifs from Milhazes’s well-known paintings populate the sculpture, reflecting the artist’s desire to celebrate the shared cultural traditions of Rio de Janeiro and New Orleans. As she explained in The New York Times, “New Orleans was always about the vitality, the dancing and the music. So I link it — the carnival in New Orleans with the Carnival in Rio. It will make this kind of dialogue between two cities”
Beatriz is expected back in Durham this September to begin work on some new prints. Please be sure to check in if you are interested in receiveing infomation closer to their release.
Beatriz Milhazes events this Fall
September 1, 2008
Fall 2008 is shaping up to be a busy one for Durham Press friend and artist, Beatriz Milhazes, as she has several noteworthy events taking place in both the United States and abroad in the upcoming months. On September 6th, her retrospective exhibition at the Pinacoteca do Estado in Sao Paulo, Brazil opens. The show will feature work spanning Beatriz’s career including a number of prints she has made in collaboration with Durham Press.
On October 10th, her third solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery opens. The show runs from October 10th, 2008 to November 15th, 2008 and will feature a selection of her new paintings and collages. The James Cohan website provides the following press release for the exhibition:
James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by artist Beatriz Milhazes, opening October 10th and running through November 15th 2008. As one of the most celebrated Brazilian artists working today, Milhazes’ exuberantly colored, rhythmically constructed abstract paintings, collages, prints and architectural installations are well-known worldwide. Milhazes merges all of the formal concerns inherent in abstract painting with a dizzying hybrid of influences that bounce off of each other to produce works in which, as the artist describes, “culture eats culture.” In her attempt to make the viewer’s eye “spin around,” Milhazes deftly uses images as a distribution system for color.
In this third solo gallery exhibition, Milhazes will present a selection of collages and paintings. In the past, the paintings have been the inspiration for the artist’s other endeavors, such as her collages made from chocolate candy wrappers, shopping bags and colored paper and her installations on building façades. In this latest body of work however, the reverse is true; the paintings, whose surfaces are built up from an elaborate process of transferring motifs painted on plastic sheet, are increasingly influenced by the immediacy of working with small bits of paper and the bold strokes of large-scale architecture. This shift, as well as a deepening involvement in nature — the artist’s Rio de Janeiro studio borders her beloved Botanic Gardens — has influenced Milhazes’ new work, making it even more rigorously structured with broader fields of color and new elements derived from abstractions of natural and architectural forms.
Not afraid to gather inspiration from sources such as Brazilian folk arts and decoration, Milhazes embraces these “low” art influences and balances them with the high-minded modernism that was brought to Latin America by an earlier generation of artists such Helio Oticica and Tarsila do Amaral. Mix in the rhythms and grooves of Tropicalismo, the spectacle of color that is Carnival and the over-the-top ornamentation of the Colonial Baroque and the paintings exemplify “anything goes”—an apt phrase coined by the Neo-Concrete artist Waldemar Coreiro in the 1960’s. As Paolo Herkenhoff explains in his catalogue essay for Milhazes’ exhibition Mares do Sul, rather than trying to create a destabilizing effect, “Milhazes aspires to encountering harmony in the absurd, her painting not being the collapse of order but that moment that follows vertigo.”
Beatriz Milhazes is participating in several important exhibitions and events in the upcoming year. Milhazes is the subject of a major survey exhibition at the Pincoteca do Estado in São Paolo, Brazil opening on September 6th 2008. Another solo exhibition is planned at the Fondation Cartier in Paris opening March 2009. Both of these solo exhibitions will include site-specific installations on the windows of the museums. Milhazes will be participating in a number of group exhibitions this fall including When Lives Become Form at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, curated by Yuko Hasegawa, opening October 21st; the Prospect 1 New Orleans, the largest biennial of international art to be organized in the US, opening October 31st for which she has been commissioned to make a chandelier-like room installation. Concurrent with the Frieze Art Fair in October 2008 will be the launch of Milhazes’ new artist book published by Ridinghouse, London, UK. In addition, The Rug Company, London UK will be launching a new limited edition artist tapestry project in October 2008 for which Milhazes has created a work and New York fabric manufacturer, Maharam is producing a line of artist’s fabrics that will include a design by Milhazes also to come out this fall.
Milhazes has exhibited widely in museums around the world and has represented her country at the 50th Venice Biennale, 2003. She has participated in many international biennial exhibitions including; Shanghai Biennale, 2006; XXVI Bienal de São Paolo, 2006 and 1998; the 11th Biennale of Sydney, 1998 and the Carnegie International, 1995. Milhazes was born in 1960 in Rio de Janiero, Brazil where lives and works today.
For further information, please contact Jane Cohan in New York at jane@jamescohan.com or telephone 212-714-9500.
As mentioned in the press release, Beatriz will also be participating in Prospect 1. New Orleans, the largest biennial of international contemporary art ever organized in the United States. Prospect 1 was curated by Dan Cameron and runs from November 1st, 2008 through January 18, 2009.
This Fall will also see the release of Beatriz’s new artist’s book published by Ridinghouse, London, UK, as well as a new limited edition artist tapestry produced by The Rug Company, London UK and a line of artists’ fabrics produced by Maharam that includes one of Beatriz’s designs. For more information about any of these projects, please visit the embedded links.
New Durham Press prints @ Marty Walker Gallery
March 29, 2008
Tonight marks the opening of Recent Prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Roland Fischer, Beatriz Milhazes, James Nares and Alison Elizabeth Taylor at Marty Walker Gallery in Dallas, Texas. All of the prints in the show are recent projects completed at Durham Press, and for Roland Fischer’s Facades on Paper III, James Nares’ GO and Alison Elizabeth Taylor’s Idylls, this is the first time they will have ever been exhibited outside of the print fairs. The show runs from March 29th to May 3rd, 2008 with an opening reception tonight, March 29th, from 5-8 pm. For more information, please visit www.martywalkergallery.com and click on “Current Exhibition.”
The Marty Walker Gallery website features the following press release for the show:
Marty Walker Gallery presents recent prints from Durham Press. Celebrating its 20th anniversary, Durham Press has earned a reputation for impeccable quality among artists, dealers and curators worldwide. A fine art print publisher based in a turn-of-the century schoolhouse in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, the Press has published and produced over one hundred limited edition contemporary prints with influential artists from around the world. Its projects have been placed with major museums and contemporary art collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Press is a member of the IFPDA. This exhibition features extraordinary new prints by Polly Apfelbaum, Roland Fischer, Beatriz Milhazes, James Nares, and Alison Elizabeth Taylor.
Polly Apfelbaum’s new multicolor wood-block prints recall the artist’s marker on silk-rayon velvet wall pieces, part Josef Albers, part Gene Davis, with the same pop sensibility that informed her flower series. The woodblock monoprint in the exhibit consists of a composition of stripes featuring a spectrum of up to eighty colors. Apfelbaum’s ubiquitous stripes simultaneously address color theory, fashion, pop culture, and rhythm, revealing themselves as both cliché yet iconic. Apfelbaum’s work is included in numerous museum collections, including the Armand Hammer Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and Magasin 3 Stockholm, Sweden.
Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes embraces motifs that might become kitschy in less skilled hands. Heavily influenced by both the botanical gardens outside her studio and her sister’s dance company, the flirtatious colors and festive patterns are steeped in carnivalesque rhythms and landscape of her native Brazil. Milhazes has exhibited extensively, showing at the 2006 Shanghai Biennial and the 2004 Venice Biennale. Milhazes has work included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanzawa, Japan, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia Madrid, Spain.
For James Nares, painting is a sort of ritual process. A finished work, comprised of a single “perfect” brushstroke, in some ways relates to Asian calligraphy. However, unlike working with ink on paper, open to the caprices of chance, Nares reworks canvases over and over until a precise gesture appears capturing the perfect brush stroke. Born in England, Nares has worked and lived in New York since 1974. Nares work is included in many collections, including Albright Knox Museum, Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
German photographer Roland Fischer photographs sections of buildings’ façades in such a way as to flatten their geometry and create two-dimensional abstract compositions that are simple and starkly beautiful. Closely cropped buildings allude to both abstract painting and portraiture, purposefully concealing the context and size of large buildings in order emphasize their unique decorative and geometric patterns. Work by Fischer is included in collections, such as the Margulies Family Collection, Merrill Lynch London, Microsoft, and Museo Municipal de Arte Contemporáneo de Madrid, among others.
And in the OTHER GALLERY, recent Columbia graduate, Alison Elizabeth Taylor masterfully works ambiguous scenes of small-town adolescent angst in a suite of screenprints published by Durham Press making their exhibition debut at Marty Walker Gallery. In this suite, Taylor continues to portray suburban small-town scenes of mischief, boredom, and awkwardness, among barren landscapes and tacky interiors. Taylor’s narratives are sharp social critiques displaying the banal and the abject in her dystopic vision of modern life. Taylor’s mundane landscapes are executed in the antiquated medium of marquetry (wood veneer inlay), for a solo exhibit at James Cohan Gallery, May 22 -June 21st, 2008.
A Year in Photos – The Making of Beatriz Milhazes’s Prints
October 13, 2007
In May 2006 Beatriz Milhazes arrived at Durham Press to make three new prints.
Five weeks later she left after making three remarkable proofs… one year later the prints were completed and signed in July 2007. Here are some photos from an extraordinary year.
Fitting woodblocks for Jamaica from Beatriz’s drawings
First reveal of woodblock on Jamaica
Jamaica’s woodblocks drying before being screened
Cutting rubies for screened background on Jamaica
Jeremy and Matt pin up Jamaica in Beatriz’s Durham Press studio
Prepping screen for Figo
JP printing another detail on Figo
Figos Drying April 07
Jackie and Jeremy fill in Beatriz’s drawing for Summer Night
Jason screens dots on Figo
Beatriz signs back of Summer Nights July 07
