MASP

The streets and the city are the themes of the work by Marcelo Cidade, who uses materials such as concrete, metal, spray paint, glass, and fencing. His artworks deal with the often-violent relations between public and private, rich and poor. In Tempo suspenso de um estado provisório, the display easel designed by Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) for MASP’s building at Avenida Paulista, inaugurated in 1968, has its crystal glass substituted by a sheet of triple-layer bulletproof glass which was shot twice by revolver. Lina’s easel is a radical way to display artworks, suspending them, removing them from the wall, humanizing them and bringing them closer to the public. Measuring 1.82 meters in height, Cidade’s easel is shorter than the original, being about as tall as a man, and can therefore represent a person fatally shot in the chest and leg. Cidade’s work poses the easel as an object of institutional reflection: shown in MASP’s Picture Gallery, it is an artwork that takes its context as its theme; it deals with the history of the space in which it is located; it is an homage to Lina’s design at the same time that it refers to that design’s violent exile, or suspension, between 1996 and 2015.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2015

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