"Lina Bo Bardi: Tupí or not Tupí. Brazil, 1946-1992"

This is the first monographic exhibition in Spain that approaches the work of Lina Bo Bardi (Rome, 1914–São Paulo, 1992). An architect by trade and an innovative creator whose aesthetic is closely associated with popular culture and social issues, Bo Bardi arrived in Brazil in 1946 and never stopped trying to make intellectual themes easily accessible and to be creative under different capacities (as architect, museographer, designer, writer, cultural activist, and curator). An artistic language innovator, she erased the boundaries between modern and traditional approaches. By borrowing the famous phrase from Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagus Manifesto), this exhibition does not try to answer "Tupí or not Tupí? That is the question." Instead, it explores the anthropophagus roots of Bo Bardi's creation, framed by the tropicalist current of the 1960s, which she clearly instigated if nothing else simply through her sheer nature (a European who moved to Brazil during a period in which the way European influences were adopted was being reassessed). The exhibition organizers divided the exhibition geographically in three sections to contextualize Bo Bardi's work: São Paulo, Salvador (Bahía), and the Brazilian Northeast. It is a fortunate collection of documents, sketches, and works by Bo Bardi, that offer clues into a trajectory shaped by her democratizing approach to art, her desire to exalt an "aristocracy of the people" from a cultural and pedagogical perspective.