During these somber and turbulent times, this exhibition of jubilant works by the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes is a hypnotic oasis. Installed in one of the Guggenheim’s tower galleries, the intermingling of fifteen large-scale paintings and collages spans a trajectory of nearly three decades from 1995 to 2023. Curated by Geaninne Gutiérrez-Guimarães, the show generates a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of converging geometric and organic shapes in vibrant, pulsating colors.  

Born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro, Milhazes gained recognition in the 1980s as a leading figure of Geração Oitenta. This pivotal Brazilian art movement championed a return to painting as an authentic and inventive medium for artistic expression, moving away from the extolled conceptual art of the previous decade led by canonical artists such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark.

Milhazes’s aesthetic influences are wide-ranging from Brazilian to European modernism—most notably, she cites Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Tarsila do Amaral in discussions. Her densely layered compositions are equally inspired by Catholic iconography, Baroque colonial architecture, and the vernacular culture of her native country. The latter, in part—a syncopated synthesis of Bossa Nova music, the costumes and parade floats of Carnival, the energy of city life—emerges from a deeply ingrained part of her childhood while growing up in Rio.

In 1989, a few years out of art school, Milhazes developed an innovative technique she calls “monotransfer,” somewhat akin to the monotype printing process by which an image is transferred from a plate to paper. The artist begins by painting her motifs onto clear plastic sheets with acrylic paint. Once the acrylic dries, she glues the painted side down on the canvas—almost like a decal—and then peels off the plastic revealing the images in reverse. She repeats this process, piece by piece, layer by layer. This painstaking hand-made process can be at times imprecise, all the more so as she re-uses the same plastic sheets for years at a time. As a result, residual shadows of older patterns, smears of glue, the occasional scratch, are etched onto the surfaces of her works.

In albis (1995), large circles rendered in pale yellows, pinks and bright oranges that float against expanses of deep indigo blue and violet suggest full moons in nocturnal skies. Halos of concentric circles composed of filigree patterns are overlayed with the shadowy silhouettes of iron chandeliers from which hang cascading rose-like motifs. This ornamental imagery evokes the opulent rococo interiors of the numerous churches built in the eighteenth-century replete with gold-encrusted altars. Intricate trellis designs in the composition, which recall the wooden lattice work of the doors and windows embedded in the curved facades of these shrines, are also in keeping with the “Brazil Baroque” style sanctioned by the Portuguese colonial clergy.

In more recent paintings such as Mistura sagrada (Sacred Mixture) from 2022, her arrangements of incongruent geometric elements appear more balanced; divisions of unstructured space, more defined. In this sense, Mistura could almost be construed as a diptych—an evenly divided composition—both thematically and stylistically. On the right-hand side, against rows of tightly furled rings, an enormous turquoise-green circle, rimmed by small vertical bands in alternating shades of purples, blues, red, ochres, and greens is intersected by a vertical stack of brown and blue abutting rectangles. Superimposed over both configurations, a large oval features undulating bands of fluorescent green and oranges. Despite, a few shared hard-edged geometric arrangements, the left half of the composition delivers a different vision: an elegiac landscape filled with biomorphic and celestial references. At the top left, a block of turquoise sky is punctuated with shooting stars strung together by garlands. Below, contained in an orb, a flower crowned by heart-shaped magenta petals stemmed by two-toned leaves in pale and dark blues, alongside a green, rose blossom, come to life. At the center, the gray-mauve background meets a band of oceanic blue composed of a multitude of tiny blue verticals strokes that edge the bottom of the canvas.

According to the wall text, the work was created during the Covid quarantine and meant as a reflection on the fragility of life. Here, most visibly, this imagery, underscored by the traceries of her hand along with the left-over physical imprints from Milhazes’s artistic process attest, rather, to our spiritual connections with nature and the cosmos.

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Beatriz Milhazes: Beauty and Rigor is on view through September 7, 2025 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.