Polly Apfelbaum and Beatriz Milhazes

April 6 – May 24, 2002
Opening Reception: Saturday, April 6, 2002, 6-8 pm

D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present a two-person exhibition with Polly Apfelbaum and Beatriz Milhazes. Each artist will present one large-scale work at the gallery.

Both artists’ work is several steps removed from, but does not reject, the practice of painting. Milhazes applies acrylic paint to plastic surfaces, allowing it to dry before removing the acrylic forms and gluing them onto canvas. Apfelbaum cuts and dyes individual pieces of velvet and eschews the canvas in favor of arranging the shapes on the floor. Both techniques allow for a period of contemplation – compositional forms in hand – and the resultant work of both artists is often complex.

Beatriz Milhazes lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Her paintings merge representational and abstract imagery, dazzling color, and a sense of depth derived in part from her unique process. Evoking a wide array of references, critics have found flora, fauna, mandalas, carnival decorations, jewelry, lace and the human body in her compositions.

Polly Apfelbaum lives and works in New York City. She considers her two-dimensional sculptures as “fallen paintings,” and the meticulously arranged pieces of fabric occupy an ambiguous space between the two genres. The work is at once rigorously structural and unabashedly emotional.

Polly Apfelbaum will be exhibiting concurrently at the Skulpturens Hus in Stockholm, Sweden, the Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, Ohio, and at Karyn Lovegrove Gallery in Los Angeles. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia will present a one-person exhibition during Spring 2003. Beatriz Milhazes has recently been presented in one-person exhibitions at the Birmingham Museum of Art in Birmingham, AL, and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England and in “Urgent Painting,” a group exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. This autumn, a traveling one-person exhibition will debut at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro and an artist’s book will be published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York.