Ahead of the opening of SP–Arte earlier this month and the vibrant São Paulo art week, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) unveiled its much-anticipated expansion, which doubled the space from 10,485 square meters to 21,863 square meters while overcoming existing structural limitations with a fourteen-story addition. “MASP grew and became bigger than its building. Expanding borders was necessary,” explained CEO Heitor Martins in a statement.
The original brutalist structure designed by Lina Bo Bardi is now complemented by the tower designed by architects Martin Corullon and Gustavo Cedroni of Metro Arquitetos Associados and named for Pietro Maria Bardi. The museum’s first director, Bo Bardi co-founded MASP in 1947 with philanthropist and media mogul Assis Chateaubriand and ran it for 15 years.
SEE ALSO: SP–Arte Founder Fernanda Feitosa Reflects On Brazil’s Lasting Cultural and Artistic Moment
MASP’s first building was commissioned in 1957 and opened in 1968, after the city of São Paulo acquired the land and declared it a “public place in perpetuity.” Anchored in that principle, Lina Bo Bardi famously created a museum “without doors”—a glass-walled monolith suspended over space on red concrete beams, landing like a spaceship atop an open plaza meant for civic life and facing one of São Paulo’s busiest streets, Avenida Paulista. The architecture invited passersby into its orbit, drawing them via a system of stairs into the exhibition space as if stepping into another dimension. Bo Bardi imagined it not as a mausoleum for masterpieces but as a living breathing site of critical thought—where art wasn’t just displayed but debated over and where change felt possible.
The display that Bo Bardi created was revolutionary at the time: tempered glass panels mounted on concrete blocks hold the artworks, which are affixed with metal brackets (MASP artistic director Adriano Pedrosa brought them to the Venice Biennale). Most notably, these “crystal easels” allow the viewer to see a painting’s back side, inviting layered readings and revealing physical traces of history usually hidden from view.
Arranged in a single, fluid gallery without walls or partitions, these freestanding structures create a forest of canvases floating in midair, disrupting any chronology, hierarchy and the usual pedagogical choreography of museumgoing. Instead of a linear journey through time, visitors are offered a kaleidoscopic glimpse of centuries and cultures, aligned with Bo Bardi’s belief that art should be open, democratic and deeply enmeshed with its context. Or as she put it, “Time is not linear, it is a marvelous entanglement”—a sentiment her display method makes tangible, allowing for a nonlinear, nonhierarchical, decentralized and pluralistic approach to history.
Deinstalled in the 1990s in favor of a more traditional hang, the crystal easels returned in 2015 with Pedrosa’s appointment—a renewed embrace of Bo Bardi’s vision. Her radical museography, long misunderstood, now feels more urgent than ever: anticipating the need to question the traditional canon of art display, Bo Bardi’s display rejected the Eurocentric perspective to embrace a more plural, multilayered and fluid way of looking at art that could respond to shifting political, social and cultural realities.
Celebrating Lina Bo Bardi’s groundbreaking revolution in museography and the legacy of this innovative curatorial approach, which is now being more broadly adopted around the world, Isaac Julien is presenting in MASP’s new building his immersive multimedia piece Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement (2019).
Throughout his career, Julien has explored video as a medium and tool to deconstruct narratives and show the complex and inherently plural interweaving of memories and histories that shape our idea of the past. Challenging dominant narratives (Western, male, linear), Julien considers how these fail to translate and properly express the multilayered plurality of visions needed to understand our history as a global civilization.
With nine-screen frames of beauty, unique both for their composition and dense lyricism, Julien offers a poetic meditation on the life, work and enduring legacy of the Italian-born Brazilian modernist architect. In Julien’s video, two of the most celebrated Brazilian actresses, Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro—both Academy Award nominees—interpret and give voice to Bo Bardi’s writings, bringing to life her ideas on the social and cultural potential of art and architecture, particularly her experiences with Afro-Brazilian culture in Bahia. Portraying Bo Bardi at different stages of her life, the installation follows her philosophical and existential ruminations on a journey through some of her most iconic buildings in Brazil, including the MASP. This is a testament not only to her genius but, perhaps more importantly, to her ethos and the ideology of resistance that buildings like MASP’s embody.
On the main floor of the original building, the masterpieces of Western art that Chateaubriand secured through an aggressive (and often controversial) fundraising campaign urging the business elites to support the museum financially remain on view. Floating side by side, we see a magnificent El Greco and a captivating Hieronymus Bosch alongside a masterful Zurbarán, some of the best works by Impressionist masters like Manet, Monet, Renoir and Degas and three rare Modigliani portraits. Today, the collection comprises over 10,000 works, extending encyclopedically well beyond its original nucleus of Western-centered art. It began with 1960s Brazilian modernism and geometric abstraction and now embraces modern and contemporary names from around the world.
Post-expansion, these works are now displayed alongside pre-Columbian and Brazilian Indigenous art and African and Afro-Brazilian art, as part of a curatorial, museographic and interpretive effort to examine art history through multiple lenses. The long-term rotating exhibition of the collection, “Picture Gallery in Transformation,” is continually shaped by new acquisitions, most often from recent exhibitions, focused on overlooked or removed narratives.
Rejecting a singular, linear history in favor of plural, layered narratives, this multi-year curatorial framework has allowed the museum to explore historically marginalized voices by adopting alternative focuses in its programming. These have ranged from “Histórias da Infância” (Histories of Childhood) in 2016 to “Histórias da Sexualidade” (Histories of Sexuality) in 2018, followed by the groundbreaking exhibition “Histórias Afro-Atlânticas” (Afro-Atlantic Histories), which later traveled to several American institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery in D.C.
In 2019, MASP turned to the history of women’s contributions to art, first with artists active before 1900, then with a second chapter focused on contemporary women artists working after 2000, with an emphasis on feminist themes and perspectives. The museum continued with “Histories of Dance” in 2020, followed by “Brazilian Histories” in 2022, commemorating the bicentennial of Brazil’s independence, and “Indigenous Histories,” coinciding with Pedrosa’s Venice Biennale.
In 2024, MASP focused on “Queer Histories,” presenting both new additions to the collection and a major exhibition—which closed on April 13—featuring an intergenerational group of LGBTQ+ artists, activists and researchers and celebrating the diversity of queer artistic expression across themes, media and generations.
Next up in 2025, MASP turns its lens to “Histories of Ecology”—a wide-reaching exhibition and programming initiative designed to spark dialogue around ecological issues as they intersect with visual culture, the human and natural sciences and evolving curatorial and artistic practices.
In the new building, the third floor is showing works from the African and Afro-Brazilian collection. A diverse group of statuettes, everyday objects, dolls, drums, furniture and masks—traditionally used in festivals, initiation rituals, celebrations and funerals—is now presented in a scenic arrangement that isolates each artifact to revive and enhance its spiritual and ritualistic presence. “These are very diverse productions that bring this notion of ‘arts’ in the plural into the title of the exhibition,” curator Leandro Muniz told Observer. “The museum’s first significant commitment to African art came in 1953, with the exhibition ‘Arte Negra,’ held six years after MASP opened,” added curator Amanda Carneiro. “This initiative was one of the first recorded exhibitions of African art in a Brazilian museum.”
A selection of newly commissioned works confronts the legacies and evolving presence of African traditions in Brazilian culture, offering a more layered and dynamic reading of the collection at the crossroads of contemporary practice and historical memory. In his digital collages, the young Brazilian artist biarritzzz splices fragments of exhibited masks with provocative phrases that question their placement in museum collections—and the distorting lens such contexts impose on their interpretation. Meanwhile, Cipriano’s abstract paintings layer chants from Afro-Brazilian religions rooted in Bantu linguistic traditions from Central Africa—a charged meditation on the convergence, friction and resilience of blended spiritual lineages.
The fifth floor of the new building hosts a focused presentation of masterpieces by French artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir from MASP’s collection. The exhibition design, conceived by architect Juliana Godoy in dialogue with Bo Bardi’s crystal easels, guides visitors through twelve paintings and a sculpture displayed on individual supports made of reflective metal sheets with curved cutouts at one end—another sign of MASP’s effort to offer a more dynamic experience of looking at art history.
On view through August on MASP’s fourth and tenth floors, “Five Essays on MASP—Geometries” offers an expansive look at the many ways Brazilian artists have engaged with geometric abstraction in the postwar period while spotlighting their interactions with the early European avant-garde. Featuring more than fifty works from the museum’s collection—including twenty recent donations—the exhibition highlights key voices from the Concretist and Neoconcretist movements, while embracing artists who reimagined geometry through other lenses, from the Afro-Brazilian spiritual symbology of Rubem Valentim to the cosmological mapping of Daiara Tukano, along with its use in textile tradition and as a political code. Here too, the exhibition design encourages a layered, plural reading—one that dissolves borders of geography, chronology and culture.
It’s worth considering that before the inauguration of the new building, just 1 percent of MASP’s collection was on display. The museum’s holdings comprise more than 11,000 works, including paintings, sculptures, objects, photographs, videos and clothing from different periods, covering European, African, Asian and American production. Until now, MASP’s programming has been tightly packed and spatially constrained; the opening of the addition means there is some breathing room in the calendar and more flexibility in the curatorial structure.
“MASP’s collection has been growing,” Pedrosa told Observer. “Our plan is to dedicate the second floor and second basement of the Lina building to long-term displays drawn from the museum’s holdings. The soaring, climate-controlled new galleries in the Pietro building will host our temporary exhibitions.”
