São Paulo’s Museu de Arte reaches for the sky to smash its space constraints – The Art Newspaper

The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Masp) will unveil its a lot anticipated enlargement on 28 March. The challenge, which has taken six years and $43m, greater than doubles the museum’s complete area, including round 11,000 sq. m to the campus. Masp’s well-known unique constructing is now complemented by an adjoining 14-storey tower. An underground tunnel connecting the 2, the final section of the challenge, is because of be accomplished later this yr.

The brand new black tower is called after Pietro Maria Bardi, the primary director of the museum, who co-founded Masp in 1947 with the philanthropist Assis Chateaubriand. Bardi subsequently led the establishment for 45 years. He was married to the Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, who designed the unique Masp constructing. The enlargement provides 5 new galleries and an additional 66% to the museum’s exhibition area. It additionally options new conservation laboratories, a reception space, lecture rooms, two multipurpose rooms, storage, loading docks, a restaurant and a café.

When Masp was first conceived, its assortment was housed on the higher flooring of a constructing within the Centro neighbourhood of São Paulo, tailored by Bo Bardi into galleries and an auditorium. Its first stand­alone dwelling was commissioned in 1957, after the town acquired the land from an investor who had requested that the plot be maintained as a “public place in perpetuity”. This impressed Bo Bardi to design a glass-and-concrete constructing supported by 4 large concrete pillars that droop its galleries eight metres away from the bottom, leaving 74 sq. m of public area beneath the construction.

Bursting on the seams

The Lina Bo Bardi constructing, as the unique construction is now known as, opened in 1968 and is taken into account a landmark in Modernist structure. Nevertheless, the constructing confronted ever extra severe limitations because the museum continued to develop over the many years. Challenges included an inefficient air-conditioning system because of area constraints on gear, a scarcity of loading docks compromising the transit of artistic endeavors, a must instal ticket places of work and storage rooms within the open-air areas beneath the constructing, and growing demand for extra exhibition area to accommodate a development in programming and viewers.

Martin Corullon and Gustavo Cedroni of Metro Arquitetos Associados, who spearheaded the enlargement challenge, had first labored with Masp in 2015, overseeing the reinstallation of the distinctive “glass easels” designed by Bo Bardi to show the museum’s everlasting assortment. The easels had been dismantled within the Nineteen Nineties and had been reinstated beneath Masp’s present creative director, Adriano Pedrosa. For the extension challenge, the architects aimed to enhance and improve “the virtues of the unique constructing”, they inform The Artwork Newspaper. They inserted home windows providing glimpses of the well-known construction and views of its roof and façade, providing new views on Bo Bardi’s magnum opus.

Masp’s new black tower was initially a failed residential challenge, the place development had been on maintain for a decade. Many of the structural parts of the constructing have been retained, such because the peripheral pillars, vertical circulation and slabs. The architects say there are some distinctive visible connections between the tower and the older Masp constructing. For instance, from the surface, a horizontal prism of the Lina Bo Bardi constructing is ready in opposition to an equal vertical prism of the Pietro Maria Bardi constructing, creating what the architects describe as a “volumetric relationship”.

The enlargement challenge, initially scheduled to be accomplished final yr, confronted delays due its complexity and placement on Avenida Paulista, one in every of São Paulo’s foremost avenues. The tunnel excavation proved to be one of many foremost challenges, requiring technical options to minimise its impression on the encircling city infrastructure. The constructing additionally needed to be strengthened.

Inaugural exhibitions

Masp is inaugurating the Pietro Maria Bardi constructing with a collection of exhibitions that current cornerstones of its 10,000-piece assortment and rejoice its historical past as the primary museum of Fashionable artwork in Brazil. Masp Histories examines a 75-year timeline of the museum, bringing collectively greater than 50 works that characteristic the variety of its assortment. In line with the exhibition’s curator, Regina Teixeira de Barros, the present “displays the formidable and progressive proposal of its founders to collect an artwork assortment that might embody completely different durations of artwork historical past whereas avoiding any hierarchy of faculties and creative actions”.

The exhibition is split into 9 sections and consists of canonical European artists similar to El Greco alongside Brazilian Modernists like Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, along with a number of lately acquired modern works and an intensive variety of hardly ever seen archival pictures and exhibition catalogues. The present additionally foregrounds key milestones and moments in Masp’s historical past, similar to its record-breaking 2019 Tarsila do Amaral retrospective, which attracted greater than 400,000 guests—surpassing its 1997 Claude Monet present.

Different highlights

Amongst different exhibition highlights this yr, Arts of Africa presents round 120 artefacts and works from the continent—largely Twentieth-century West African sculptures and masks acquired within the museum’s early years. In line with the curator Amanda Carneiro, the present displays Masp’s pioneering and enduring curiosity in African artwork, in addition to its “dedication to fostering dialogue and sustaining curiosity in world creative manufacturing, transferring past a primarily Brazilian and European focus”. The exhibition references Masp’s 1953 landmark present Arte Negra, one of many earliest recorded exhibitions of African artwork in a Brazilian museum. It additionally consists of commissions by two Brazilian artists participating with Masp’s assortment—biarritzzz presents a video themed round African masks, whereas Pedro Ivo Cipriano’s work are impressed by Afro-Brazilian spiritual chants.

One other of Masp’s new reveals is Pierre-Auguste Renoir, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Fernando Oliva, which incorporates 13 hardly ever exhibited works from Masp’s assortment. And in September, Pedrosa and the curators André Mesquita and Isabella Rjeille will open the exhibition Histories of Ecology—a world group present spanning 5 flooring of the brand new constructing and that includes works responding to the intensification of the local weather and political crises. Later this yr, Masp additionally plans to activate the general public area beneath the overhang of the Lina Bo Bardi constructing with a free collection of exhibitions and programming. Prior to now, the realm has been vandalised, littered and infrequently occupied by tents pitched by the town’s unhoused inhabitants.

Heitor Martins, the president of Masp, started fundraising for this enlargement again in 2019. The challenge was funded solely by means of personal donors, together with Cleusa Garfinkel, a Brazilian artwork collector; Denise Aguiar Alvarez, the director of Fundação Bradesco; André and Lilian Esteves, philanthropists with a background in funding banking; and the politician Ronaldo Cezar Coelho.