Roberto Burle Marx at the Jewish Museum

The Jewish Museum in New York will be featuring the exhibition Roberto Burle Marx: Brazilian Modernist, curated by Jens Hoffmann and Claudia J. Nahson this upcoming May. The exhibition will present over one hundred works by Burle Marx, from his earliest forays into landscape architecture to never-before-seen designs for synagogues and other Jewish sites he created late in life. A number of international contemporary artists who have been inspired by Burle Marx will also be featured in the exhibition, including Juan Araujo, Paloma Bosquê, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Luisa Lambri, Arto Lindsay, Nick Mauss, and Beatriz Milhazes. Brazilian artist Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994) is one of the most prominent landscape architects of the twentieth century, known for his projects which range from the remarkable mosaic pavements on the seaside avenue of Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana Beach to the multitude of gardens that embellish Brasilia, one of several-large scale projects he executed in collaboration with famed architect Oscar Niemeyer. This exhibition explores the richness and breadth of the artist's oeuvre—from landscape architecture to painting, from sculpture to theater design, from tapestries to jewelry. The son of a German-Jewish father and a Brazilian mother of French, Portuguese, and Dutch descent, Burle Marx embraced modernism in the early 1930s as the movement was taking hold in his country among artists and intellectuals. Using abstraction as his guiding principle and the voluminous local foliage and colorful flora as his palette, Burle Marx revolutionized garden design. Throughout a more than sixty-year career, Burle Marx designed over 2,000 gardens worldwide and discovered over thirty plant species that now bear his name, while never ceasing to paint, sculpt, and design textiles. He was also an art collector, a talented baritone, and a consummate cook. After its presentation at the Jewish Museum, New York, the exhibition will travel to the Deutsche Bank Kunst Halle in Berlin, Germany, and the Museu de Arte do Rio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. In conjunction with the exhibition, the Jewish Museum and Yale University Press are publishing a 224-page catalogue by Jens Hoffmann and Claudia J. Nahson.