The São Paulo Museum of Art is recreating a 1968 exhibition layout by Brazilian Modernist Lina Bo Bardi, with updated versions of her glass and concrete easels.
A single of the glass easels. Photograph by Fernando Stankuns
São Paulo based Metro has recreated more than 100 of the easels – which featured a pane of glass supported by a concrete cube – by examining pieces that remained from the originals.
The São Paulo Museum of Artwork (MASP) commissioned the up to date easels to recreate an original exhibition style by the architect for a new demonstrate of 117 artworks from 400 BC to the 2000s.
Gallery overview. Photograph by Fernando Stankuns
“The easels were withdrawn in 1996 but are now returning in the context of the recovery of the architect’s designs for MASP,” said the museum.
“Latest generations will as a result be in a position to observe at very first hand a radical exhibition design and style that has persisted in the imagination of the Brazilian and worldwide public during the last 20 years, although acknowledged to the museum’s younger guests only by means of pictures or documentation.”
View of Art from France exhibition 2015 on MASP’s very first floor. Photograph by Eduardo Ortega, courtesy of MASP assortment
Bo Bardi – born in Italy in 1914 – moved to Brazil in 1946 with her husband Pietro Maria Bardi, who founded MASP with Assis Chateaubriand the following yr. Bo Bardi created the museum’s building on Avenida Paulista, as properly as a amount of social housing and personal tasks.
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Her work has only recently turn out to be far more broadly recognised, prompting the revival of product designs which includes a door deal with from her 1951 house and a bowl-shaped chair from the exact same year. Last yr, photographer Leonardo Finotti documented eight of the architect’s most important buildings to mark what would have been her 100th birthday.
View of MASP’s assortment exhibition room 1970. Photograph by Paolo Gasparini, courtesy of Lina Bo and Pietro Maria Bardi Institute
MASP’s artistic director Adriano Pedrosa is aiming to recover and revive a quantity of Bo Bardi’s original creations for the museum. Preceding shows this year also resuscitated exhibition styles by the architect.
“All of these exhibition patterns anticipated the qualities of transparency, lightness and suspension, without having divisions into rooms or rigid timelines – the identical approach that was later on utilized to the design of the easels,” stated the museum.
See of the assortment of MASP 1970. Photograph by Luiz Hossaka, courtesy of MASP Collection
With the glass and concrete easels, the architect intended to create a non-linear exhibition by suspending artworks during the room instead of mounting it on the walls.
“The architecture becomes wide, open, transparent, fluid, and permeable, with numerous prospects for accessibility and studying,” stated MASP.
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Metro has recreated keys aspects of Bo Bardi’s design, including using a wooden wedge with a rubber skin to repair the glass to its concrete base. Information about every single artwork is displayed on the back of the glass pane.
Updates contain standardising the allocation of holes drilled into the glass panes – originally certain to the personal piece on display – which are used to attach the artworks using a metal bar.
View of MASP 1973. Photograph by Luis Hossaka, courtesy of MASP Assortment
Neoprene washers were added to stabilise the easels and dampen vibrations that may cause damage to the artwork.
The exhibition opens on 11 December on the 2nd floor of the museum.
