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.'

Abstraction: Thomas Muller @ Fruehsorge|contemporary drawings, Berlin

Thomas Müller, 'Untitled' 2010, pencil chalk and ink on handmade paper, 160 x 115 cm

It's the last couple of days of Thomas Müller at Fruehsorge | contemporary drawings, Heidestrasse, Berlin, next to the contemporary art museum Hamburger Bahnhof.  This exhibition will run until 3rd June 2011. 

Muller is an artist who works in abstraction and only uses the medium of drawing, and I can't think of a better place for an exhibition than the Fruehsorge. He has shown at the New York Drawing Centre and in the exhibition “Linea, Linie, Line” at the Institute for Foreign Cultural Relations extensive drawing overview in Bonn. His work is also present among numerous German and international collections such as Kunsthalle Hamburg, Pinakothek der Moderne München, the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France. In 2010 Müller was nominated for the Fondation Guerlain’s renowned “Prix de dessin contemporain”.

Müller's work explores 'the substance and nature of drawing and the drawing process itself, which materializes as a stroke or trace on the page and means the line doesn’t depict nor describe but becomes the subject matter itself.' What is also interesting is the use of such diverse materials such as chalk, ink, oils, acrylics, ballpoint pen, colour and led pencil and yet he retains a coolness to the final image in that he doesn't make that use of the materials the main thing about it. He explored the space of the picture plain with minimal markings in a rythmn of interwoven grids and wave-like structures, that have a zen like quality. Gorgeous..