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.

The generative principles that structure Milhazes’s paintings find a material counterpart in her collages, which translate processes of accumulation and exchange through an expansive archive of patterned and printed matter. In this recent body of work, she mines the histories of textile and decorative design while extending her practice of collection and reuse. These collages synthesise a broad array of ornamental vocabularies, including the bold florals of 1960s and ’70s Flower Power imagery and embroidered motifs of traditional European folk dress. Certain materials introduce a more personal and quotidian register: papers painted by the artist herself, her mother, and her long-time studio assistant, alongside ribbons preserved from gifts and celebrations, provide a diaristic quality to the works.

Milhazes’s practice partakes of a distinctly Brazilian modernist sensibility characterised by hybridisation, transformation and absorption. Coming to prominence in the 1980s as part of Brazil’s Geração Oitenta, she was among a generation that reclaimed painting’s sensual and expressive potential after years of conceptual austerity under the military dictatorship of 1964–85. The optimism of that era, and its renewed confidence in painting as a space of imaginative freedom and vitality, endures throughout her work. Her reconciliation of dissonant patterns and sources sustains this impulse, allowing heterogeneity to unfold as formal invention.

Casting glimmers of golden, liturgical light across the ground-floor gallery, Milhazes’s site-specific installation Além do Horizonte (2025), which lends its title to the exhibition, transforms the space into an immersive field of shifting colour and pattern, responsive to the viewer’s movement. The panoramic vinyl mural unfurls across the gallery’s walls, organising rippling bands of blue and green beneath pink-orange suns, mirrored golden leaves and constellations of stars. Transposing the coastal atmosphere of the artist’s native Rio de Janeiro into dialogue with the gallery’s London setting, Além do Horizonte advances Milhazes’s vision of art as an ongoing negotiation of difference: an ever-shifting horizon of convergence and return that intimates the possibility of harmony within multiplicity.