Casa de Maria, Beatriz Milhazes (1992) (EMPIRE LINES x Tate St Ives, Turner Contemporary)

Contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes collages arabesques from Baroque Portugal and Brazil’s many indigenous communities, tracing religious and natural patterns in Roman Catholicism, Islamic architectures, and the islands of Japan, through Casa de Maria (1992).

Known for her colourful, large-scale abstract paintings, Beatriz Milhazes’ practice reflects how Brazilian culture has long ‘assimilated’ plural influences, particularly the effects of Portuguese and Spanish colonial rule between the 17th and 19th centuries. Arches, doors, stained glass windows, and burnished golds, drawn from churches across South America, recur as motifs in works spanning forty years. Beatriz layers ruffles and rosettes, precursors to the circles in her more recent paintings, from royal Hispanic costumes, and textiles found in city markets and Carnival parades. Her studio overlooks Rio de Janeiro’s botanical garden, another construct of colonial rule, and environment which inspires her creations.

For the artist, flowers are both ‘natural’ and ‘plastic’ bodies - like the water, and ‘salty sea breeze’ which connects her home in Brazil and the coastal cities of Britain, where her work is currently on display. Beatriz outlines the centrality of nature in popular and indigenous cultural production, and interest in ornamental ‘body drawings’ by women in the Kadiwéu tribe. She shares how she adapts the concept of collage to painting on canvas, calling on Western/European modernism, geometric abstraction, and ‘scientific research’ into colour for her exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2024. From a kimono in the collection of the V&A, a diplomatic gift from the emperor of Japan, Beatriz travels to her Yellow Flower Dream (2018) for the 'Art House Project' on Inujima - an island in the country’s Seto Island Sea, also recreated in Kensington, at Japan House London. We touch on more histories of migration in São Paulo, home to Japan’s largest diasporic community, and the ‘union’ of cultural, economic, and ecological regeneration taking place across continents today.

Beatriz Milhazes: Maresias runs at Tate St Ives in Cornwall until 29 September 2024.

For more, you can read my article from the first exhibition at the Turner Contemporary in Margate in 2023, in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/colour-and-abstraction-beatriz-milhazes-at-margates-turner-contemporary

For more from Tate St Ives in Cornwall, hear curator Morad Montazami on the Casablanca Art School (1962-1987).

For more from Japan House London, hear curator Hashimoto Mari on Hasegawa Akira’s Antique French Military Uniform with Kumihimo (2021), and read about WAVE: Currents in Japanese Graphic Arts (2023), in gowithYamo: gowithyamo.com/blog/wave-currents-in-japanese-graphic-arts-at-japan-house-london

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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