Navigating Beatriz Milhazes’ febrile reinvention of geometric abstraction can feel like trying to make headway through a carnival crowd. Hoops, mandalas, flowers and other circular motifs spin like dancers across her canvases, their bright colours slamming into each other. With its erupting forms, which have evolved from tumbly, lacy arabesques to hard-edged grids, sprouting leaves and flowing waves, the Rio de Janeiro-based artist’s work has the excess of a street party, a baroque church, a jungle.
“I’ve tried to bring new possibilities to the course of abstraction,” she says while getting ready for her first UK institutional show in more than two decades: a survey, at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, of 20 key paintings spanning her 30-plus year career as one of the world’s leading abstract painters. “My challenge is how to work with geometry and life. I’m in favour of life, we need it!”
