Burle Marx

Painter, sculptor, landscape architect, horticulturalist, specialist in tropical flora, and designer in his lifetime of over 2000 gardens, Burle Marx is probably best known for the Copacabana promenade in Rio, a spectacular river of sinuous geometries composed of black, white, and terracotta mosaic that became a symbol of modernist Brasil. The work featured above is probably not so well-known but no less impressive. Developed in 1975 by Burle Marx with his sometime collaborator the artist Haruyoshi Ono, the design lay dormant for several decades. In 2014 it was resurrected and now flanks the Praça da Assembleia in Belo Horizonte. It is very much of its time, and for a moment as I sat on a bench in the spring sunshine contemplating the embossed shadows, it made me think of its unloved siblings that proliferated across buildings and public spaces in 1970s urban Britain. Simply titled, “Homenagem a Burle Marx”, it is a masterpiece of cast-in-situ concrete rooted in the architecture of Mesoamerica, the abstract geometries of indigenous body art and the shape patterns of the modernist avant-garde.