Lina Bo Bardi Drawing

The Fundació Joan Miró presents Lina Bo Bardi Drawing, the first exhibition to focus on the role of drawing in the life and work of the Italian-born Brazilian architect

The exhibition features a carefully selected collection of a hundred drawings from the Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi archives, bearing witness to the importance of drawing in all stages of Bo Bardi’s career. The project has been curated by another architect, Zeuler Rocha Lima – also an artist, scholar, and international expert on Bo Bardi.

Architect Lina Bo Bardi (1914-92) always felt a strong connection with drawing. Throughout her lifetime and in all artistic fields she ventured into, drawing was always present. Rather than merely a tool for designing, drawing was a fundamental means of expression in Bo Bardi’s hand, stemming out of her strong sense of curiosity and doubt.

She discovered drawing as a child with the help of her father—an amateur painter—and received her training in art and architecture in her native Rome. After developing a successful career in Brazil, Lina Bo Bardi is now considered one of the outstanding 20th-century architects and has been internationally acclaimed for her work as a designer, editor, curator and intellectual.

While many architects, designers, and artists debated—and continue to debate—about the formal aspects of space and artistic production, Bo Bardi devoted her career to understanding the profound connection between design and everyday life.

Lina Bo Bardi Drawing offers a constellation of images organized in four thematic rooms and inviting visitors to make free associations between the numerous facets of her life and practice. The drawings, produced in a variety of techniques—pencil, watercolour, gouache, felt pen, pen, and ink—reveal her broad view of design and architecture, which merges different artistic sensibilities.

The exhibition begins with a room that focuses on the natural world. Plants had been present in Bo Bardi’s drawings ever since her childhood, as a symbol of life cycles. In 1956, when she visited Barcelona, Bo Bardi discovered Antoni Gaudí, whose interest in plants and organic forms helped change the Brazilian-Italian architect’s language from that moment on.

Bo Bardi considered people to be the protagonists of architecture, an ongoing theme seen throughout her drawings. The exhibition continues to address this aspect in an ensemble of pieces in which the human body appears not as a measuring reference, but as a way of being in the world, both individually and collectively.

Through her continued practice of drawing, Lina Bo Bardi started her career in editorial and curatorial works in Milan and extended that experience after moving to Brazil in 1946. Through her experience in publishing and exhibition design, Bo Bardi knew how to use images to promote values and generate innovative ways of seeing, helping promote an original visual culture that is the subject of the third section of the exhibition.

Her body of work as an architect conveys her conviction that life should be at the center of the way designers conceive of objects, buildings and urban spaces, as the fourth section of the exhibition demonstrates. The project is complemented by a video documentary dedicated to Bo Bardi’s work as a curator and a monograph signed by the curator and co-edited by the Fundació Joan Miró and Princeton University Press.

Lina Bo Bardi Drawing invites visitors to discover the broad, rich range of reflection and the output of one of the outstanding architects and intellectuals of the 20th century, who bridged the gap between art and life using the language she felt to be her own: drawing.

Exhibition sponsored by
Banco Sabadell Foundation