The return of Lina Bo Bardi’s radical crystal easels to the display of the collection presents a selection of 119 artworks drawn from the museum’s diverse holdings, spanning from the 4th century BC to 2008. The easels were first presented at the opening of the museum’s current venue in 1968, and with drawn in 1996.

Beginning this year METRO Arquitetos was invited to incorporate the new curatorial team of the São Paulo Museum of Art - MASP becoming responsible forall exhibit designs, upgrade and redesign of all internal areas of the institution. In this new phase, the museum intends to focus on its private collection throughout the year in a series of exhibitions focused on Brazilian, Italian, French art, fashion and photography. It will also focus on the formation and growth of this collection, which highlights the importance of redeeming the consolidation of the museum in the Brazilian cultural scene.

The exhibition designs will reconstitute the original projects defined by Lina Bo Bardi for MASP. One of them being the FAAP (Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado) exhibit, between 1957 and1959 in São Paulo and the other for the collection at the former MASP headquarters at Rua 7 de Abril which will be displayed in the first floor gallery.

Along with the expographic projects and exhibitions, the recovery of the museum’s original architecture designed by Lina Bo Bardi will also be seen in the restoration of its spatiality and original features such as transparency, lost due to successive interventions. This recovery process will culminate in the re-exhibition of the permanent collection in the famous glass and concrete artwork display designed by Bo Bardi on the second floor of the museum.

Dates.- project.- 2014. Completed.- 2015
Total exhibitting area.- 3684 m²
Design development.- Martin Corullon, Gustavo Cedroni, Helena Cavalheiro, Juliana Ziebell
Team.- Luis Tavares, Marina Pereira, Marina Cecchi
Photos.- Ilana Bessler (exposição e montagem),Eduardo Ortega (exhibition and process), Flavio Bragaia (models and process)

The return of the easels is not a fetishistic or nostalgic gesture in regard to what has become an iconic exhibition display device, but should rather be understood as part of a programmatic revision of Bo Bardi’s spatial and conceptual contributions to museum practice. The political dimension of her proposals is suggested by the open, transparent, fluid, and permeable picture gallery, which offers multiple possibilities for access and reading, eliminates hierarchies and predetermined paths, and challenges canonical art-historical narratives. The gesture of taking the paintings off the wall and placing them on the easels implies their desacralization, rendering them more familiar to the public. Moreover, the placement of the labels on their backs allows for an initial direct encounter with the work, free from an interpretive framework. In this context, the museum experience becomes more human, plural, and democratic

In the original configuration of the easels, Lina Bo Bardi and Pietro Maria Bardi organized the works by artistic schools or regions. Now they will be placed in strict chronological order, laid out in a meandering path. This organization does not coincide with the chronology of art history, with its schools and movements, nor does it oblige the public to follow its course. The spatial transparency of the open floor plan and the easels invites visitors to construct their own path, enabling unexpected juxtapositions and dialogues between Asian, African, Brazilian, and European art. Furthermore, Picture Gallery in Transformation is a semi-permanent collection display, as it will remain open to frequent changes, adjustments and modifications, already planned for early 2016. In this sense, the exhibition avoids the typical ossification and sedimentation of permanent collection displays.

The exhibition’s focus on figurative art reflects the history of the collection and the interests of Bo Bardi and Bardi, who resisted the hegemony of the abstract tradition in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s. They were both wary of abstraction’s potentially depoliticizing effects, in the context of the promotion of geometric abstraction by the US through its Good Neighbor policy during the Cold War. The current display also includes works by artists traditionally considered outside of the Brazilian art-historical canon – such as Agostinho Batista de Freitas, Djanira, José Antônio da Silva, and Maria Auxiliadora – highlighting MASP’s commitment to diversity and multiplicity. The only contemporary work in the display, Marcelo Cidade’s Tempo suspenso de um estado provisório[Suspended Time of a Provisory State], 2008, turns the glass easel into an object of institutional reflection. Its presence also signals the museum’s desire to resume its dialogue with contemporary art in the picture gallery.

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METRO. Founded in 2000 in São Paulo, METRO works in different scales, from temporary installations to urban interventions. The work allies a modernist architectural tradition, resulting from the frequent collaboration with the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha [Pritzker Prize 2006], to a practice which complies with contemporary issues. On the one hand, we look after an architecture in which material organization serves the public use of the built spaces; on the other, we look upon the importance of formal speculation and research on materials, besides an approach that tries to recognize and bring solutions to the necessities and desires of the wide network of agents involved in the production of space.
 
MARTIN CORULLON. Trained as an Architect at The Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at The University of São Paulo [FAUUSP]. Holds a Masters degree from the same institution. Founded METRO ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS in 2000. Since 1994 has been a close collaborator of Paulo Mendes da Rocha. During 2008 and 2009 he worked at Foster+Partners in London.

GUSTAVO CEDRONI. Founder. Qualified as an Architect at FAAP in 2000. Worked with Pedro Paulo de Melo Saraiva in 1999, and with Eduardo Colonelli in 2000. Became a collaborator at METRO ARQUITETOS ASSOCIADOS, and partner in 2007. Participated in the Architecture Biennale of Venice with a video installation in 2006 and taught at the European Institute of Design in São Paulo during 2010. In 2012, he worked with Rem Koolhaas's OMA in NY.

HELENA CAVALHEIRO Graduated as Architect and Urbanist by the Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul at Porto Alegre in 2008, joining METRO in 2012; becoming an associate in 2016. Previous experiences include the design and delivery of the architectural and exhibition project for Mercosul’s 8th Biennial of Visual Arts in 2011.

MARINA IOSHII Trained as an Architect at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo, working in the office of METRO since 2010. Previously worked for The Curitiba Institute of Urban Planning & Research [IPPUC] and at Arquispace Projetos & Obras, in Curitiba.

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Achillina Bo was born on December 5, 1914 in Rome, Italy. Lina was the oldest child of Enrico and Giovana Bo, who later had another daughter named Graziella. In 1939, she graduated from the Rome College of Architecture at the age of 25 with her final piece, "The Maternity and Infancy Care Centre". She then moved to Milan to begin working with architect Carlo Pagani in the Studio Bo e Pagani, No 12, Via Gesù. Bo Bardi collaborated (until 1943) with architect and designer Giò Ponti on the magazine Lo Stile – nella casa e nell’arredamento. In 1942, at the age of 28, she opened her own architectural studio on Via Gesù, but the lack of work during wartime soon led Bardi to take up illustration for newspapers and magazines such as Stile, Grazia, Belleza, Tempo, Vetrina and Illustrazione Italiana. Her office was destroyed by an aerial bombing in 1943. From 1944-5 Bardi was the Deputy Director of Domus magazine.

The event prompted her deeper involvement in the Italian Communist Party. In 1945, Domus commissioned Bo Bardi to travel around Italy with Carlo Pagani and photographer Federico Patellani to document and evaluate the situation of the destroyed country. Bo Bardi, Pagani and Bruno Zevi established the weekly magazine A – Attualità, Architettura, Abitazione, Arte in Milan (A Cultura della Vita).[4] She also collaborated on the daily newspaper Milano Sera, directed by Elio Vittorini. Bo Bardi took part in the First National Meeting for Reconstruction in Milan, alerting people to the indifference of public opinion on the subject, which for her covered both the physical and moral reconstruction of the country.

In 1946, Bo Bardi moved to Rome and married the art critic and journalist Pietro Maria Bardi.

In Brazil, Bo Bardi expanded his ideas influenced by a recent and overflowing culture different from the European situation. Along with her husband, they decided to live in Rio de Janeiro, delighted with the nature of the city and its modernist buildings, like the current Gustavo Capanema Palace, known as the Ministry of Education and Culture, designed by Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, Roberto Burle Marx and a group of young Brazilian architects. Pietro Bardi was commissioned by a museum from Sao Paulo city where they established their permanent residence.

There they began a collection of Brazilian popular art (its main influence) and his work took on the dimension of the dialogue between the modern and the Popular. Bo Bardi spoke of a space to be built by living people, an unfinished space that would be completed by the popular and everyday use.
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Published on: December 30, 2015
Cite: "The return of Lina Bo Bardi’s radical crystal easels by METRO Arquitetos" METALOCUS. Accessed
<https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/return-lina-bo-bardis-radical-crystal-easels-metro-arquitetos> ISSN 1139-6415
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