Dovetail

Dovetail by Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes unites relief, screenprint, and gold leaf in a complex, harmonious composition.  Referencing the woodworking technique used to produce a strong joint between two boards without any mechanical fasteners, the title Dovetail calls attention to the meticulous craftsmanship that enabled both prints’ crisp, curvaceous forms. The printing blocks, cut with a CNC machine, interlock with the exactitude of a Mondrian abstraction, and while certain shapes are purely geometric, some reference clouds, stars, and other celestial phenomena. The works precision is softened, however, by the addition of hand-drawn floral and rain imagery. Milhazes’s flowers, in particular, are rendered here in a whimsical, relatively detailed style that recalls her depictions of blossoms and fruits in her collaged paintings of the 1990s and early 2000s.

About Beatriz Milhazes

Beatriz Milhazes (born 1960) is a Brazilian artist. Milhazes is known for her work juxtaposing Brazilian cultural imagery and references to western Modernist painting.

The daughter of a lawyer and an art historian, Milhazes was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1960. She studied social communication at Faculdades Integradas Hélio Alonso (FACHA), Rio De Janeiro from 1978 to 1981 and studied at the School of Visual Arts (Escola de Artes Visuais – EAV) of Parque Lage, Rio De Janeiro from 1980 to 1982.