Exhibition Reviews 168

selected from the Bardis record collection,

resulting in an evocative, dreamlike orchestral
composition. A recording of the performance
now plays on the record player in the living room.
All around it, newly commissioned artworks mix
with pieces from the Bardis collection: a marble
statue of Diana from the ffth to frst century BC
alongside a Sarah Morris painting, Lina Bo Bardi
(2013), describing the curves of Bo Bardis nearby
1951 Bowl chair.
A reworked vintage portrait of Bo Bardi,
installed on the glass facing into the house by the
contemporary artist Renata Lucas and a pair of
1948 cartoon portraits of Bo Bardi and her
husband, Pietro, by Alexander Calder, are the
most literal representations of the houses
charismatic former inhabitants. And while pieces
by some of the most interesting young talents in
Brazilian art approach the house from oblique
angles eg, Jonathan de Andrades hundreds of
glass plaques, bearing images of an abandoned,
fooded modernist yacht club, snaking around
the foor and Paulo Nazareths rough concrete
watermelons and bananas Rivane
Neuenschwanders intervention nails it with all
the grace and harmony of simplicity.
Taking Bo Bardis love of Brazilian
vernacular art as her inspiration, and with a nod
to the elegant furniture she created for the Casa
de Vidro, Neuenschwander presents a set of
found, handmade stools one from a street seller
in Bahia, north Brazil, where Lina spent some of
the most fulflling years of her professional life;
one found in a carpark; another fshed from a
skip. Reconditioning them without compromising
their spontaneity, Neuenschwander places them
inside the house, infltrators from the world of
folk design. An elegant red number can be found
in the master bathroom, and another, in the
radiant magenta of purpleheart wood (roxinho),
sits at Bo Bardis work desk as if it had always
been there.
Olafur Eliassons work also strikes a
harmonious tone: Fading Self Wall (2013) sees a
large looking glass set on one of the plinths Bo
Bardi created to display artworks inside the MASP
museum an unparalleled glass-and-crimson
structure, and her most famous architectural
work. The mirrored portion of Eliassons sheet
of glass multiplies its immediate surroundings
and the tangled green aura beyond the windows;
then, as the mirroring gives way to an expanse
of transparent glass, it reveals the entrance hall
behind, seen across an internal courtyard in a
confusion of refection and refraction. The works
many, complex lines of sight are in contrast with
the more formal reflective interplay of an
installation by Waltercio Caldas, in which
mirrored bedroom walls reflect each other
endlessly, their printed words, camoufage,
cylinder and boomerang, ricocheting back and
forth to infnity across an ugly blue carpet.
The Insides Are on the Outside
Casa de Vidro, So Paulo
4 April 26 May
Seting a major art exhibition inside modernist
architect Lina Bo Bardis former residence Casa
de Vidro, or Glass House, always risked the
houses lush surroundings overwhelming the art
not least due to the form of its wild gardens, a
sensual jolt of jungle. Curator Hans Ulrich
Obrists trick, with this group exhibition, is to
enlist the house, gardens and contents, and
inviting more than 30 Brazilian and international
artists to work on a series of site-specifc pieces:
to immerse themselves in Lina Bo Bardis world
in order to establish intimate relationships with
this singularly important fgure.
This exhibition, part of which also takes
place at the magnifcent SESC Pompia culture
and leisure centre Bo Bardi created between 1977
and 1982, is the latest in a series of house-
museum projects curated and conceived by
Obrist, the most recent of which took place at the
home of the poet Federico Garca Lorca, in
Granada, in 20078.
In Cinthia Marcelles Audio (2012),
performed during the prelude at the Casa de
Vidro in September 2012, 11 musicians
simultaneously played diferent works, self-
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Cildo Meireless intervention, Pietro Bo, is
a bitter smell of roasting cofee that pervades the
house and the garden studio, overlaid with a
strident imitation of Pietros voice saying in
Italian, Lina, go and make some cofee! As I
lingered there one stormy afternoon in April, rain
spattering the glass house, the voice soon became
irritating presumably Meireless intention. The
phrases origins have been trotted out over and
over in the material produced for and about the
exhibition, as if it were some sort of explanation:
that when talk veered towards a political
disagreement at the Bardi house, Pietro would
bark it out as if to end the discussion. The
response of Bo Bardi, a profoundly erudite,
opinionated woman, and a former member of
the Italian Communist party, is recorded nowhere
except, perhaps, in the hearts of invigilators, who
have to listen to the recording all day long,
dreaming that Bo Bardi might materialise to put
a stop to it once and for all.
CLAIRE RIGBY
Reviews .indd 168 16/05/2013 13:49
ArtReview 169
Sarah Morris
(see The Insides
Are on the Outside)
Lina Bo Bardi, 2013
Rivane Neuenschwander
(see The Insides Are
on the Outside)
found sool, 2013
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