Art Of The Day Weekly
#429 - from 5 May 2016 to 11 May 2016
Roberto Burle Marx, mineral roof garden, Banco Safra headquarters, São Paulo, 1983. Photograph © Leonardo Finotti
Burle Marx, a tropical landscape artist
NEW YORK – He contributed to the design of the Unesco headquarters in Paris, he collaborated with Niemeyer and Lucio Costa to the design of Brasilia, he left his famous waves on the pavement of Copacabana and even planted a garden on the roof of the Safra bank. Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) was an important figure in Brazilian modernism, which he applied to gardens by combining tropical exuberance with precepts of abstraction. “He approached the matter of the garden as a painter”, the critic of Jornal do Brasil, Mario Pedrosa wrote in 1958 (as we saw in a beautiful exhibition at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris in 2011). Of course this exhibition shows that aspect of his creation. There is a place of honor for his own garden, the Sítio, in Guaratiba, near Rio de Janeiro, but also for his other passions as a painter, sculptor, set designer, jewelry designer, etc.
• Roberto Burle Marx at the Jewish Museum, from 6 May to 18 September 2016.