Her Name is Rio
Brazil’s leading contemporary artist, Beatriz Milhazes, brings a selection of her unique work to White Cube. Claire Rigby explores her motifs
t’s a sultry november in Rio de Janeiro, and although summer’s height is still a couple of months away, the day is hot, sticky and humid, thanks to Rio’s tropical location, its lengthy, lovely shoreline and the dark, iconic mountains that surround it. In a house on a pretty street close to the city’s lush botanical gardens, artist Beatriz Milhazes is shuffling through a stack of just-finished collages on a table in the ground-floor space beneath her painting studio. Clad in a fine-knit electric-blue jersey and a pencil skirt, she pulls out one after another of the colourful artworks, pointing out their different elements—three kinds of leaf-shaped cut-outs, colourful fields of printed gift wrap and foil, and the odd candy wrapper.
Once recurring elements in her collage work, the wrappers appear only occasionally in this series. “They aren’t as central as they used to be,” says Milhazes. “They’re there as part of the texture, rather than being so prominent. I used to name some of my collages after those sweets and chocolates—it was much easier then,” she says with a laugh. “But I’ve had to come up with lots of new names for these works.”
Milhazes points out a set of metal weights on the floor, explaining that she uses them to press the collages, flattening them to perfection underneath heavy boards. As she points, gold rings glitter on each finger—there’s a sovereign ring with a lion’s head, and a deep pink tourmaline, while in her ears are a pair of gold rings, setting off soft curls and brightening her animated face as she speaks.
“These are the first collages I’ve made since 2011,” she says, handling the artworks affectionately and without ceremony, running her fingers over them to illustrate her points as she speaks. The collages, together with one new painting, are destined for Hong Kong—where they are now on show at White Cube until May in Milhazes’s first exhibition in Asia since her 2006 participation in the Shanghai Biennale.
Since starting out in the 1980s as a student at Rio’s Parque Lage School of Visual Arts, Milhazes has won dizzying wealth and fame as a painter—her canvases have sold for more than US$1 million at auction on four different occasions since 2012. But collage, too, has always been an integral part of her artistic practice. A major retrospective of her work at the Peréz Art