Beatriz Morales

Published in conjunction with the Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes’ (born 1960) first solo exhibition at Pace since she joined the gallery in 2020, this book spotlights 10 vibrant, large-scale paintings she created during pandemic quarantine, as well as an immersive multimedia installation titled Gamboa III (2020), which incorporates materials found in carnival props. Including additional images of Milhazes’ previous sculptural works and new texts that illuminate her highly generative practice, the publication immerses readers in the artist’s colorful, spiritual world. An essay by curator Mark Godfrey explores Milhazes' art as it relates to the terms “landscape” and “logo,” “structure” and “spontaneity” and “surface” and “spirituality”; and a conversation between Milhazes and fellow artist Polly Apfelbaum delves into Milhazes’ emergence within the international art scene and her relationship with her practice today.

Color Archaeology is the first major monographic cross-section of the versatile and engaging work of Mexican artist Beatriz Morales (born 1981). The selection of work represented in this special volume is complemented with texts by Lebanese cognitive scientist Yasmina Jraissati, curator Michel Blancsubé and author Luisa Reyes Retana. A portrait of an unusual autodidactic artist who integrates Latin America, Central Europe and the Middle East in her work, this book also takes a broad, in-depth look at the very nature of color.
Morales’ multilayered oeuvre—encompassing painting, installation and video—and Jraissati’s scientific, philosophical view of the interplay between color and cultural influence open up to the reader an expanded perspective of color and materiality in art, unfolding between the poles of the traditional and the contemporary, the individuals and the universal. Curator Michel Blancsubé, a renowned specialist on contemporary Mexican art, provides analytical commentary on Morales‘ oeuvre, while award winning novelist Luisa Reyes Retana engages poetically with the artist‘s biography between Mexico City, Beirut and Berlin.