A Conversation

Beatriz Milhazes

Beatriz Milhazes’s work bursts with a chromatic and freeing vitality. Renowned for her visual language rooted in painting, collage, and printmaking, she draws on her native Rio de Janeiro. Her use of color and geometry is mined from place—the botanical gardens and the Tijuca forest near her studio, the surrounding city, its ocean front, and the cultural motifs of Brazil—and from memory. “My challenge has always been the same. I’m interested in life and my surroundings, but to make it work as a painting, I do need to think as a geometric and conceptual artist in my studio practice.” This process culminates in the artist’s patented form of abstraction, which she has termed “chromatic free geometry.” In the 1980s, she headed a new generation of artists—Geração 80 or 80s Generation—that embraced painting over the conceptual practices of the 1970s. Marked by the seminal exhibition Como vai você geração 80? (How Are You 80s Generation?) in 1984, this return to painting saw a freedom in process, in the studio as a space for action, and in a rich and amalgamated form of Brazilian art making influenced by European Modernism, the Baroque, and the Antropofagia of the late-1920s.

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Kelly Taxter

Kelly Taxter is the Barnett and Annalee Newman Curator of Contemporary Art at The Jewish Museum. She has organized the career surveys of Rachel Feinstein, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, and Isaac Mizrahi, the contemporary group exhibitions Unorthodox and Take Me (I’m Yours), and focused projects with Beatriz Milhazes, Laurie Simmons, Eva LeWitt, Vivian Suter, Alex Israel, Valeska Soares, and Chantal Joffe. Taxter received an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University.