The Easel

26th August 2025

Beatriz Milhazes’s Labors of Love at the Guggenheim

Shana Nys Dambrot | The Village Voice | 20th July 2025

Milhaze loves colour and the circular form. Add to this her mash-up of Brazilian and European geometric abstraction and the resulting paintings and collages are, says one writer, a “controlled riot of form and colour”. Botanical motifs appear frequently as do textile-like patterning, all represented in the “saturated palette of tropical modernism. This work is beautiful but not contemplative. It’s optically disruptive”.  Milhaze is regarded as Brazil’s most successful contemporary painter.

Picasso: tête-à-tête

Michael Cary | Gagosian Quarterly | 11th April 2025

Phillip Guston was vilified when, in 1970, he changed from abstract expressionism to figuration. Little wonder then that artists usually stick with a single style. Not Picasso though. He thought that sticking to one style simply led to “affectation”. In fact, he celebrated that he had “no style” and even went so far as to deny that his work could be divided into “periods”. “What counts is a certain consistency in the ideas. And when this consistency exists … things always work out.”

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