The Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Masp) will unveil its much anticipated expansion on 28 March. The project, which has taken six years and $43m, more than doubles the museum’s total space, adding around 11,000 sq. m to the campus. Masp’s famous original building is now complemented by an adjacent 14-storey tower. An underground tunnel connecting the two, the last phase of the project, is due to be completed later this year.

The new black tower is named after Pietro Maria Bardi, the first director of the museum, who co-founded Masp in 1947 with the philanthropist Assis Chateaubriand. Bardi subsequently led the institution for 45 years. He was married to the Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, who designed the original Masp building. The expansion adds five new galleries and an extra 66% to the museum’s exhibition space. It also features new conservation laboratories, a reception area, classrooms, two multipurpose rooms, storage, loading docks, a restaurant and a café.

When Masp was first conceived, its collection was housed on the upper floors of a building in the Centro neighbourhood of São Paulo, adapted by Bo Bardi into galleries and an auditorium. Its first stand­alone home was commissioned in 1957, after the city acquired the land from an investor who had requested that the plot be maintained as a “public place in perpetuity”. This inspired Bo Bardi to design a glass-and-concrete building supported by four massive concrete pillars that suspend its galleries eight metres clear of the ground, leaving 74 sq. m of public space underneath the structure.

Bursting at the seams

The Lina Bo Bardi building, as the original structure is now called, opened in 1968 and is considered a landmark in Modernist architecture. However, the building faced ever more serious limitations as the museum continued to grow over the decades. Challenges included an inefficient air-conditioning system as a result of space constraints on equipment, a lack of loading docks compromising the transit of works of art, a need to instal ticket offices and storage rooms in the open-air areas under the building, and increasing demand for more exhibition space to accommodate a growth in programming and audience.

Martin Corullon and Gustavo Cedroni of Metro Arquitetos Associados, who spearheaded the expansion project, had first worked with Masp in 2015, overseeing the reinstallation of the unique “glass easels” designed by Bo Bardi to display the museum’s permanent collection. The easels had been dismantled in the 1990s and were reinstated under Masp’s current artistic director, Adriano Pedrosa. For the extension project, the architects aimed to complement and enhance “the virtues of the original building”, they tell The Art Newspaper. They inserted windows offering glimpses of the famous structure and views of its roof and façade, offering new perspectives on Bo Bardi’s magnum opus.

Masp’s new black tower was originally a failed residential project, where construction had been on hold for a decade. Most of the structural elements of the building have been retained, such as the peripheral pillars, vertical circulation and slabs. The architects say there are some unique visual connections between the tower and the older Masp building. For example, from the outside, a horizontal prism of the Lina Bo Bardi building is set against an equivalent vertical prism of the Pietro Maria Bardi building, creating what the architects describe as a “volumetric relationship”.

The expansion project, initially scheduled to be completed last year, faced delays due its complexity and location on Avenida Paulista, one of São Paulo’s main avenues. The tunnel excavation proved to be one of the main challenges, requiring technical solutions to minimise its impact on the surrounding urban infrastructure. The building also had to be reinforced.

Inaugural exhibitions

Masp is inaugurating the Pietro Maria Bardi building with a series of exhibitions that present cornerstones of its 10,000-piece collection and celebrate its history as the first museum of Modern art in Brazil. Masp Histories examines a 75-year timeline of the museum, bringing together more than 50 works that feature the diversity of its collection. According to the exhibition’s curator, Regina Teixeira de Barros, the show “reflects the ambitious and innovative proposal of its founders to gather an art collection that would encompass different periods of art history while avoiding any hierarchy of schools and artistic movements”.

The exhibition is divided into nine sections and includes canonical European artists such as El Greco alongside Brazilian Modernists like Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, in addition to several recently acquired contemporary works and an extensive number of rarely seen archival photographs and exhibition catalogues. The show also foregrounds key milestones and moments in Masp’s history, such as its record-breaking 2019 Tarsila do Amaral retrospective, which attracted more than 400,000 visitors—surpassing its 1997 Claude Monet show.

Other highlights

Among other exhibition highlights this year, Arts of Africa presents around 120 artefacts and works from the continent—mostly 20th-century West African sculptures and masks acquired in the museum’s early years. According to the curator Amanda Carneiro, the show reflects Masp’s pioneering and enduring interest in African art, as well as its “commitment to fostering dialogue and maintaining interest in global artistic production, moving beyond a primarily Brazilian and European focus”. The exhibition references Masp’s 1953 landmark show Arte Negra, one of the earliest recorded exhibitions of African art in a Brazilian museum. It also includes commissions by two Brazilian artists engaging with Masp’s collection—biarritzzz presents a video themed around African masks, while Pedro Ivo Cipriano’s paintings are inspired by Afro-Brazilian religious chants.

Another of Masp’s new shows is Pierre-Auguste Renoir, curated by Adriano Pedrosa and Fernando Oliva, which includes 13 rarely exhibited works from Masp’s collection. And in September, Pedrosa and the curators André Mesquita and Isabella Rjeille will open the exhibition Histories of Ecology—an international group show spanning five floors of the new building and featuring works responding to the intensification of the climate and political crises. Later this year, Masp also plans to activate the public space under the overhang of the Lina Bo Bardi building with a free series of exhibitions and programming. In the past, the area has been vandalised, littered and occasionally occupied by tents pitched by the city’s unhoused population.

Heitor Martins, the president of Masp, began fundraising for this expansion back in 2019. The project was funded entirely through private donors, including Cleusa Garfinkel, a Brazilian art collector; Denise Aguiar Alvarez, the director of Fundação Bradesco; André and Lilian Esteves, philanthropists with a background in investment banking; and the politician Ronaldo Cezar Coelho.