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The holidays have come early this year—in the shape of the gift to end all gifts, a 19-by-14.5-by-3.5-inch, 22-pound slab of glory that is the signed, limited-edition, slip-covered coffee-table book of Beatriz Milhazes’s work. Launching tonight at New York’s Taschen store, the book joins the ranks of other large-format Taschen volumes from artists such as Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, and Ai Weiwei. One thousand copies are available, at a price that matches the book in heft: $1,000.
Milhazes is a Brazilian painter based in Rio de Janeiro, whose international reputation has steadily grown over the past 20 years. When she exhibited in a solo show at Miami’s Pérez Museum in 2014, Vogue’s Dodie Kazanjian went to visit her in her studio near Rio’s Jardim Botânico, and found her to be “a small person with a very big presence.” Her paintings, too, have a very big presence. She builds exhilarating abstractions in vibrant colors that reference flowers, circles, and geometric patterns overlaid on the canvas, using a collage technique she has developed with plastic sheets, acrylic paint, and glue.
The book, edited by Hans Werner Holzwarth, contains a chronology of works as well as essays on its various aspects, including a glossary compiled by Adriano Pedrosa that focuses on such Milhazian motifs as “the arabesque,” “the compass flower,” “the frill,” and “the dark.” But no amount of words can compete with the beauty and joy of the paintings themselves, all the more welcome reproduced in the book’s giant-size pages.
A turning point in Milhazes’s life came on a trip to Paris in her 20s (she is currently in her late 50s), when she saw Matisse’s work up close for the first time and realized that incorporating decorative elements and lush colors does not make a painting any less serious. Like Matisse’s, her appeal spreads beyond straightforward art lovers to anyone interested in design, color, and pattern. She now spends winter in Paris every year, though her true muse remains the city of her birth. As fellow Brazilian artist Vik Muniz told Vogue, “Everything about Beatriz’s work comes from the direct experience of her environment,” one she herself describes as follows: “Rio is not a flower place. What we have is green from nature and blue from the sky. It’s nature in a very intense and exuberant way, which stimulates me to go to the studio and make something.”
We’re happy about that, and thankful to her for bringing a ray of Brazilian sunshine into our lives—as well as its spirit. “The best thing to do in Rio,” she told Vogue, “is just to be in Rio.” Next best thing? A trip to Soho’s Greene Street, where this book awaits.