BEATRIZ MILHAZES: ALÉM DO HORIZONTE
WHITE CUBE is pleased to present Além do Horizonte, Beatriz Milhazes’s exhibition of paintings.
November 19 – January 17, 2026
In ‘Além do Horizonte’ (‘Beyond the Horizon’), Beatriz Milhazes deepens her evolving enquiry into the aesthetic and affective potential of colour, pattern and ornament. Building on investigations first pursued in her presentation for the 2024 Venice Biennale, the exhibition at Mason’s Yard brings together new paintings, collages and a site-specific installation, drawing upon an expanded archive of textile and decorative sources that trace the psychedelia of mid-20th-century print culture, indigenous Brazilian and European design, ornamental craft traditions, and the accumulated materials of her own studio practice. Throughout, Milhazes orchestrates these syncretic idioms into chromatic architectures in which order and exuberance ignite a productive tension, sustaining a sense of simultaneity and interconnectedness.
In developing her recent paintings, Milhazes turned to the woodblock portraits of the Edo-period printmaker Hokusai (1760–1849), wherein the patterned volumes of kimonos appear at once to conceal and articulate the human form. In works such as Pictures of the Floating World (2025) and Olokun – Goddess of The Sea (2025), pattern becomes a means of evoking presence without recourse to direct figuration – their violet-blue and white grounds serving to frame silhouettes of figures composed of overlapping geometries: ovoid forms, concentric circles and undulating lines. Executed through her distinctive mono-transfer process – whereby motifs are painted onto sheets of transparent plastic and, once dry, transferred in reverse onto the canvas – this dialogue between figure and ground marks a new inflection in Milhazes’s mediation of colour and form.
Against the customary abundance of her pictorial fields, the introduction of black and white establishes tonal contrasts that generate shadow and depth, opening intervals of visual respite that hints to the presence of a body within the ornamental plane. Though The Botanical Mind (2025) describes a denser, more aggregated field, it too coheres around a central animating presence from which surrounding hues and geometries can be seen to orbit and return. Veils of bicoloured stripes traverse the canvas, suggesting zones of transparency that play against areas of solid-colour opacity, generating an ocular rhythm that situates the work within Milhazes’s long-standing engagement with the legacies of Op Art.
References to organic growth and movement are evident throughout the works. Many of her forms recall flowers and foliage, while horizon lines, as in Swirling Water (2025), where a radiant pink and orange orb hovers above a rolling expanse of corresponding oranges and deep blues, suggest the meeting of sea and sunset. Beneath the chromatic exuberance of the works runs a mathematical logic that evokes the generative geometries of nature – an ordering impulse through which repetition and accumulation give rise to form. Geometry here assumes an organic agency that opens onto a broader conceptual terrain. To borrow curator Yuko Hasegawa’s term, Milhazes’s compositions enact ‘meta-organic horizons’: pictorial ecologies that ‘permit the construction of all the organs of which they are composed’.1 Within these febrile architectures, pattern behaves like a living system: a self-generating structure that produces its own rhythms and correspondences. Beyond a depiction of life forces, Milhazes’s compositions engage in these fundamental processes, appearing themselves to move, breathe and reproduce.