MUNICH.- Lina Bo Bardi 100: Brazil's Alternative Path to Modernism is the most comprehensive assessment of the internationally renowned architect to take place outside of Brazil. The Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) defined her own particular artistic path through outstanding designs starting at the mid-twentieth century. In architecture as well as stage sets, graphic art, fashion and furniture design, she implemented impulses of Modernism, but interpreted them quite individually.
The conscious examination of her adopted country, Brazil, its culture, society and politics, provided the base for her creativity. Her partly radical views manifested themselves in her designs, exhibitions and writings. The exhibition focuses on key aspects in the work of this multifaceted designer who made Brazilian architectural history and offers a unique opportunity to encounter her original designs.
The Architekturmuseum specifically commissioned Veronika Kellndorfer as the only artist to create new work to accompany Lina Bo Bardi's exhibition. Kellndorfer's body of work, collectively titled "Tropical Modernism," works in direct concert with Bo Bardi's architecture. Kellndorfer's photograph, Tree House (Casa de Vidro), was taken earlier this year in São Paulo at Casa de Vidro, the residential house built by Bo Bardi in the 1950s. There is a unique fragility and vulnerability to the house, with its thin, stilted columns supporting the building as it protrudes from the jungle-like garden. In this work, Kellndorfer's photographic view of the modernist glass house is reproduced as a silk-screened image on glass. Like a virtual screen, the glass façade reflects the uncanny way in which the vegetation slides into the image.
In addition, Kellndorfer has created a new, site-specific intervention of four nearly seven-foot square glass panels installed on the façade of the Architekturmuseum. Encompassing the span of almost 65 feet, Kellndorfer's monumental installation of colored and backlit silkscreen prints on glass is made from her own photographs of the SESC Pompéia Factory that was remodeled by Bo Bardi. The silkscreened panels depict abstractions of the amorphous openings cut into the exposed concrete walls that form the windows of the SESC Pompéia Factory in São Paulo.
Kellndorfer's works reflect the open structures of Lina Bo Bardi's architecture and transfers them into an arrangement of transparent and opaque elements. This occupation with the architecture of Lina Bo Bardi is a continuation of Kellndorfer's research into architecture as a myth, from Mendelsohn to Mies van der Rohe, to Schindler, Wright and Taut, and as far as Villa Katsura in Japan. In her practice she examines the graphic quality of architecture and its intersection with the landscape, as well as the transformation of light and the movement between inside and outside. Kellndorfer focuses on the intimate details of windows and reflections and how they reveal the ephemeral nature of seeing, as well as the subjectivity of space.
The exhibition is accompanied by a more than 350 page catalog, Lina Bo Bardi 100: Brazil's Alternative Path to Modernism published in English and German by Hatje Cantz. The catalog features texts by Renato Anelli, Vera Simone Bader, Anna Carboncini, Gabriella Cianciolo Cosentino, Sabine von Fischer, Steffen Lehmann, Andres Lepik, Zeuler R.M. de A. Lima, Olivia de Oliveira, Catherine Veikos, and Guilherme Wisni. The exhibition was curated by Vera Simone Bader and designed by Brazilian architect Marina Correia.
