Curated by Jens Hoffmann and Claudia J. Nahson
With an immediately recognizable palette of forms between paintings, prints, tapestries, and above all gardens, Roberto Burle Marx was one of only a handful of polymath twentieth-century designers able to infuse a subtly layered sense of space to his work at every scale, from jewelry to urban space. Though he has long been celebrated as having translated painting into landscape architecture, this first presentation of the Brazilian artist’s work in New York in a quarter century will also emphasize the ways in which his fluency with plants—he discovered some fifty species—was driven by a subtle exploration of layers of hue, time, and light and shadow. This display of some 150 works also includes theater design and Burle Marx’s little-known late work for synagogues, all the while exploring his ongoing influence on contemporary artists. Travels to the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin, July 7–Oct. 8, 2017; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Nov. 2017–Mar. 2018.
