Beatriz Milhazes
Gamboa Seasons in La Jolla, 2020
1111 Prospect Street (back of building)
18' x 108'
Iris and Matthew Strauss; Lise Wilson and Steve Strauss – Wall Sponsors
Beatriz Milhazes’ mural, Gamboa Seasons in La Jolla, is the reproduction of Gamboa Seasons, a series of four acrylic on canvas paintings: Summer Love, Autumn Love, Winter Love, and Spring Love (2010), first shown at the Beyeler Foundation in Switzerland in 2011.
Utilizing a structure of vibrant, geometric abstraction, the four seasons are visually expressed from left to right. Each season is represented in different dimensions as a reference to their intensity in Rio de Janeiro: a spectacular Summer, a pleasant Autumn, passing through a modest – foreign – Winter, that leads us into a lovely Spring.
Beatriz’s vivid, kaleidoscopic paintings are now revisited as a large-scale installation, leading the viewer through the different emotionality, color-spectrum, and imagery unique to each of the seasons. Gamboa Seasons in La Jolla’s structural framework is punctuated by recurring sets of arabesque motifs inspired by Brazilian culture. Ceramics, lacework, carnival decoration, music, and Colonial baroque architecture are reimagined to evoke the corresponding season. The viewer is led through both a linear and non-linear journey as the work plays between abstraction and representation. Contrasting color-palettes and unusual shape combinations concurrently evoke an unbound joy and an unsettling tension as the composition unfolds into an ecstatic visual drama.
Beatriz Milhazes is a Brazilian artist, well known for her large-scale paintings, as well as collages, prints and sculpture. Milhazes’ work draws from both Latin American and European traditions. Citing opera, classical, and popular Brazilian music as influences, Milhazes’ style is imbued with an upbeat energy within the stripes, lines, circular forms, and rays scattered throughout her compositions. The careful balance of harmony and dissonance in her work, combined with her technicolor palette, are evidence of the strong influence of such 20th century masters as Tarsila do Amaral, Oswald de Andrade, Matisse, Kandinksy, and Delaunay.
Milhazes represented Brazil at the 2003 Venice Biennale. She has had numerous notable solo and group exhibitions at various institutions including the Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, FR; the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris, FR; and the Pinacoteca do Estado de Sao Paulo. Her work is held in a number of permanent collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sophia, Madrid, Spain; 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, Japan; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; and Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA.
Milhazes is a figurehead of the 80’s generation of Brazilian art, which was characterized by the return of young artists to painting. She lives in Rio, where she was born in 1960, and works there in a studio with a view overlooking the Botanical Garden.
Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann