Peace and Love

This commission by Beatriz Milhazes for Gloucester Road Tube station was significant new work for the artist that occupied an entire side of the station. The work created a visual dialogue with both the architecture and the constant movement of trains and travellers, offering a compelling visual drama as a counterpoint to the activity and movement within the station.

Beatriz Milhazes’ rich and complex work draws together motifs that have their roots in her everyday environment, and includes references to natural forms, folk art, carnival, and Brazilian baroque decoration. She transforms these influences into abstract patterns and ornamental shapes, which shift between the recognisable and the unfamiliar. Using a technique reminiscent of collage, intricately layered images are built up, their surfaces pulsating with intense colour. The combination of harmony with often violent contrasts results in a visual experience that embodies a sense of the musical.

Each of the nineteen vaulted arches on the platform contained a part of the dense, tightly-knit composition. The work was created using adhesive vinyls in many colours. Working closely with a vinyl production company, the image had to be carefully brought together by taking the hand-made drawings from Milhazes and transforming them to digital patterns for computer-linked vinyl cutting machines.

About the artist
Beatriz Milhazes’ (born 1960 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) practice includes painting, drawing and collage. Characterised by sensual colour, optical movement and energetic visual cadences, her abstract work fuses a diverse repertoire of images and forms. Combining elements from her native Brazilian culture with European abstraction, her colourful, densely layered works are held in a state of tension, balanced carefully between order and chaos, rational structure and spontaneity. Often pushed to their compositional limit, with cascading, proliferating forms overlaid across the canvas, her paintings seem at a point of collapse, ready to engulf the viewer in an explosion of form and colour.

Part of a generation that emerged in the 1980s from Brazil, who enjoyed a return to painting after the art of the 1970s, Milhazes has said “I am an abstract painter and I speak an international language, but my interest is in things and behaviours that can only be found in Brazil”.

Commissioned by Art on the Underground