This summer, Tate St Ives is hosting Maresias, a major exhibition of the work of Rio de Janeiro-born Beatriz Milhazes, one of the leading abstract artists working today.
O Diamante, 2002 by Beatriz Milhazes
The exhibition celebrates the evolution of her approach over four decades, while also highlighting nature as an enduring and increasingly important theme in her work.
Turner Contemporary, in Margate, which first staged Maresias, has collaborated with Tate St Ives to re-imagine the exhibition, bringing it to a second UK coastal destination.
Maresias refers to the salty sea breeze that is part of Milhazes’s everyday life in Rio de Janeiro. The exhibition encourages us to reflect on our own relationship with the environment.
“My context has been surrounded by forests, mountains, and coastal experiences, the development of a ‘tropical’ way of thinking,” said Beatriz.
“It was very special to exhibit my work at Turner Contemporary and now at Tate St Ives — to smell the sea salt breeze of the same ocean as Rio de Janeiro. Same water, different cultures, but in the end it is all about life.”
The exhibition takes the viewer through a journey of Milhazes’s work since 1989, a breakthrough moment for her when, frustrated by the appearance of brushstrokes, which she saw as signs of the artist’s hand, she developed her distinctive ‘monotransfer’ technique, in which she paints her own motifs onto plastic sheeting before transposing them onto canvas.
