Abstract paintings of Beatriz Milhazes, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin..

There is something appealling about the work of Beatriz Milhazes, something on the edage of textile design yet with a traditional collage quality, symetrical shapes and interplay with the surface...last week at Galerie Max Helzler, Berlin

Noir

 'Milhazes plays cultural cliché and tropicalist kitsch against the unyielding rationalism of hard lines, surrounding chaos with cool areas of unfettered colour. It’s an approach which lends her paintings a tension and dynamism that steers familiar iconography into less obviously charted territory. Geometric abstraction lurks behind flourishes of an unfettered brightness'  wrote Jennifer Higgie, Frieze Magazine.

Carlyle

'Beatriz Milhazes’ work calls to mind cross-cultural references ranging from local flora, Rio's urban verve or Brazilian Baroque. Equally present are echoes of Henri Matisse's papiers découpés, Bridget Riley's early paintings or Brazilian Modernism established by artists such as Tarsila do Amaral in the late 1920s, which reworked and renewed external stimuli by incorporating them into the context of local history and culture.'

Ann Edholm, 'Where is the sky, where?', new Minimalist paintings, Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm

Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm, 'Where is the sky? Where?' Installation view

A new Malevich?...Ann Edholm 'Where is the sky? Where?' Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm. 'Here are a new body of paintings by recent Carnegie Art Award recipient, Ann Edholm. Working in extended series Edholm stages large, occasionally even monumental, paintings that straddle both geometric abstraction and subtle expressionism. The latter reveals itself in barely perceptible marks made by the brush or, more often, the palette knife, thus destabilizing the seemingly solid compositional patterns of basic geometric shapes.

Ann Edholm, 'Var är himlen? Var?' Oil and wax on canvas, 200 x 200 cm

With an elaborate network of cultural, religious and symbolic references Edholm meticulously merges classical painting with elemental geometric shapes and slight painterly gestures. The size of the canvases and the relationship between form, scale and colour in the compositions subtly define the meeting between viewer and painting.

Over recent years Edholm’s work has become increasingly autobiographical, tying in her mother’s experience of living through the bombings of Berlin at the end of World War II. The exhibition at Galerie Nordenhake is titled after a line in one of Paul Celan’s Romanian poems, the night before the deportations began. Here Edholm presents a group of paintings of varying sizes and proportions that take on the theme of psychologically and historically loaded site. The paintings are not narrative but deal more with a physical sense of presence in which site can be place, city, or the location of transfer or deportation.'