Beatriz Milhazes

On September 25, 2025, Casa Roberto Marinho (CRM) will open Pinturas Nômades [Nomadic Paintings], a solo show by Rio de Janeiro artist Beatriz Milhazes, a leading figure in the international contemporary art scene. Curated by Lauro Cavalcanti, the exhibition presents, for the first time in Brazil, reconstructions of architectural projects developed by the artist across four continents – Europe, North America, South America, and Asia. The exhibition celebrates two decades of Milhazes’s work dedicated to the creation of pictorial installations in architectural and institutional spaces.

Produced by Casa Roberto Marinho, Pinturas Nômades presents an innovative panorama of the artist’s work, bringing together reconstructions of site-specific interventions originally created for prestigious venues around the world: the Vienna Opera House; Tate Modern, London; Selfridges, Manchester; the London Underground; Fondation Cartier, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Long Museum, Shanghai; and Fundação Gulbenkian, Lisbon, among others. The exhibition also includes permanent projects, including for Art House on Inujima Island, Japan, and for the Presbyterian Hospital of New York. Forming the central core of the exhibition, these projects are presented through models, studies, and panels never before seen in Brazil, offering the public a rare opportunity to experience firsthand the architectural dimension of Milhazes’s work.

According to curator Lauro Cavalcanti, in these interventions created between 2004 and 2023, Milhazes developed striking visual investigations that dialogue with architectural surfaces. Working mainly with colored vinyl, mural painting, and ceramics, she has created luminous compositions that explore light, color, and transparency, establishing relationships between interior and exterior, opacity and translucence, drawing and architecture.

In projects such as Gávea (Selfridges & Co., Manchester, 2004), Guanabara (Tate Modern, London, 2005), Peace and Love (Gloucester Road Station, London, 2005), and O Esplendor I and II (Long Museum, Shanghai, 2021; Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK, 2023), Milhazes has transformed façades, windows, and spaces of public passage into sensorial experiences, animated by organic forms, vibrant visual rhythms, and poetic atmospheres.

“These works, presented in institutions and spaces such as hospitals, subway stations, and residential buildings, combine art and its relationships with social issues, sustainability, and the urban context, lending them perceptible form. Introducing mandalas, stripes, ellipses, or circles onto glass surfaces or curved structures, she adds new layers of meaning to these environments, evoking abstract landscapes, cultural references, and visual memories. In each intervention, Milhazes expands the viewer’s experience of space, proposing an encounter between painting, architecture, and contemplation,” notes Cavalcanti.

Painting lies at the heart of Beatriz’s work and recurs poetically along the visitor’s journey through the Casa, manifesting in works like Mocotó (2007), A Mosca (2010/2012), and Lampião (2013/2014).

From the very outset of her career, Beatriz has drawn on the varied representations of nature and daily life found in Architecture, Folk Art, Indigenous Art, Decorative Art, and the fields of Applied Arts and Art History. To convey this breadth to visitors, the exhibition presents a room dedicated to her special project for the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024, developed for the Applied Arts Pavilion, a collaboration between the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), London, and the Biennale. The paintings O céu, as estrelas e o bailado [The Sky, the Stars, and the Dance] (2023) and Meia-noite, Meio-dia [Midnight, Noon] (2023) are shown alongside a table of fabrics from Milhazes’s personal collection, gathered from diverse cultures and regions around the world, which have served as reference material in the development of her works. Completing this space is the never-before-shown tapestry Dance in Yellow (2020).

One of the rooms is devoted to a set of eleven prints. According to the artist, “[printmaking] is the technique that most closely approximates, in formal and aesthetic terms, the results of the panels and murals,” thus using graphic art to place these two practices into dialogue.

The exhibition will also feature performances by Marcia Milhazes Cia de Dança, presenting recent works conceived in direct dialogue with the exhibition’s universe. The recurrent collaborations between the Milhazes sisters in Beatriz’s exhibitions in Brazil and worldwide have involved encounters that interlace visual compositions with choreographic proposals.

In the suspended sculpture Mariola (2010–2015) – which greets visitors in the first room – Milhazes translates signature elements of her visual language into three dimensions, creating a striking work in dialogue with the exhibition space.

Also on the ground floor, visitors will find the installation Corumbê, conceived especially for the exhibition, consisting of translucent vinyl applied to the five arched windows of the main hall. The work weaves affective and aesthetic connections with the architecture of the former residence, while also evoking the legacy of artist Djanira da Motta e Silva and the popular traditions of Paraty, a historic coastal town in Rio de Janeiro state, which was Milhazes’s mother’s hometown and where the artist spent much of her childhood.

Beatriz has remarked how, at the start of the planning for this exhibition, she arrived at CRM for a meeting with Cavalcanti and found “the large ground-floor salon empty, its windows framing the magnificent Burle Marx garden. I was captivated! At that very moment, I envisioned the image of a drawing in stained-glass, in dialogue with the natural world outside while poetically embracing the interior space. Something to contemplate, to live with, to reflect upon.” She continues: “In the design for the arched windows, almost like chapels, the memory of Djanira was present. Her work has always been a reference for my painting, and the Roberto Marinho Collection holds masterworks by this artist. My maternal family is from Paraty, where the tradition of religious festivals is strong, and I spent much of my childhood and adolescence there. Corumbê tells a beautiful story – a story rooted in Rio.”

In the same space, visitors will encounter the panel Waving Flowers, a life-size painting originally developed for Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin. Executed in five shades of gray, the work is outstanding for its formal and aesthetic power within a monochromatic palette, establishing a dialogue with the two-toned diamond-patterned floor of the CRM’s large ground-floor salon and with the designs in stained-glass of Corumbê. In the adjoining room, three paintings by Djanira, from the Roberto Marinho Collection, reinforce the bond between two generations of women central to Brazilian art.

The upper floor is entirely devoted to contemplative poetic nuclei that emphasize the role of color, ornament, and visual structure in the creation of a singular language. According to Lauro Cavalcanti, the arrangement of the works “touches the sublime that art, at times, attains.”

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