In the 1997 Venice Biennale, Portuguese artist Julião Sarmento exhibited a large mixed-media work from his “White Paintings” series titled To Take Off the Lace and Blow the Flower, 1997, an enigmatic image of three female figures (two of whom are headless) posed around a table. For his current show at the Hirshhorn Museum, he created five new “White Paintings” and two sculptures loosely based on the figural elements of To Take Off the Lace. In the resulting work (all 1998), Sarmento achieves a stylistic unity through an economy of means and an almost “styleless” rendering of form. In the paintings,