Lina Bo Bardi studied architecture in Rome and moved to Brazil in 1946, where she worked as an architect, magazine editor, graphic designer, furniture designer, set designer, curator, and writer in São Paulo. The city is home to two of her most iconic buildings: the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP) and the SESC Pompéia. In 2021, she won the Biennale Architettura’s Gold Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Bo Bardi’s “glass easel” is a legendary device in the history of exhibition displays. It was specially conceived for MASP’s picture gallery and was first revealed at the museum’s opening in 1968. It consists of a thick glass plate inserted into a concrete cube, forming a self-supporting transparent panel onto which a picture is hung. The artwork’s label is affixed to the back, so that the visitor may first encounter the work without any historical contextualisation. Bo Bardi sought to present works as the product of labour, aiming to desacralise them. Rough, raw, and industrial materials were employed in both the building’s construction and the easels, which function as a counterpoint to the museum’s refined classical European collection – it now also includes contemporary art. In a space of 2,000 square metres, the easels are distributed in rows as if in a parade or mimicking a forest of artworks. Removed from the walls, the artworks become more accessible, and the visitor can establish a closer and more direct relationship with them. Bo Bardi’s system was influenced by Franco Albini’s exhibition displays at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan in the 1940s and inspired the Louvre-Lens’s Galerie du Temps, designed by SANAA, which opened in 2012.
This is the first time the work of Lina Bo Bardi is presented at Biennale Arte.
—Adriano Pedrosa
