Nomadic Paintings features 17 works by Beatriz Milhazes created for specific architectural settings in Asia, North America, South America, and Europe. Installed in signature buildings – some designed by Pritzker Prize laureates such as Jean Nouvel, David Chipperfield, and the Japanese duo Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa – most of these artistic interventions had never before been the subject of an exhibition prior to the one presented in this book.

In her paintings, the territory through which Milhazes moves and resolves her work is two-dimensional, beginning with a blank canvas. In her site-specific projects, however, pictorial questions meet those of three-dimensional space, which she must necessarily engage. Logics of spatial organization and the distribution of volumes that once felt remote have come to form part of her expanded field of practice.

Her interventions in public circulation spaces have made her work accessible to a wider audience. In keeping with her interest in Brazilian modernism, they evoke the finest tradition of Rio de Janeiro architecture from the 1940s to the 1960s, shaped by the dynamic interplay between artists such as Portinari, Paulo Werneck, Di Cavalcanti, and Athos Bulcão and architects including Oscar Niemeyer, Lúcio Costa, the Roberto Brothers, Affonso Reidy, and Jorge Moreira.

Lauro Cavalcanti