Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960, Rio de Janeiro) is widely regarded as Brazil's most successful living painter -- a bold, kaleidoscopic force whose work sits at the charged intersection of European modernism and the deep visual culture of her homeland. Initially trained in social communications before turning to fine art at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, she came to prominence in the 1980s as a figurehead of the Geração 80, a generation of Brazilian artists that returned painting to the center of contemporary practice. Her touchstones are explicit -- Matisse, Mondrian, Sonia Delaunay, and Tarsila do Amaral -- but the synthesis is entirely her own.Her practice is rooted in a patented technique that removes the painter's hand from the surface entirely. Milhazes paints dense, geometric patterns onto clear plastic sheets, transfers them onto canvas, then peels the plastic away -- a process repeated in multiple layers to build compositions of extraordinary chromatic complexity. The result is painting that reads as both rigorously constructed and exuberantly alive, drawing on botanical forms, Carnival geometry, Baroque architecture, and the visual rhythms of Rio itself. She has termed this approach chromatic free geometry.Her works are held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museu Nacional de Belas Artes, the Reina Sofía, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Fondation Beyeler, among many others. She represented Brazil at the 2003 Venice Biennale and was the subject of a major career retrospective at the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2014--2015. She is represented by Pace Gallery, White Cube, and Galerie Max Hetzler. She lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.