BRUSSELS.- Martins&Montero presents Abertura: Lina Bo Bardi and the 1980's, an exhibition dedicated to the Italian-Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi, curated by João Grinspum Ferraz. The show opens tomorrow, April 22, at the Brussels gallery.

The exhibition brings together architecture, contemporary art, and furniture to foreground a central aspect of her practice: space as a field of use, encounter, and transformation. Rather than treating her work as a fixed formal language, the show resists reductive readings and reactivates its radical dimension.

Among the central sections are the furnishings designed for SESC Pompéia, a project initiated in 1976 and inaugurated between 1982 and 1986, transforming a former factory into a center for culture, sports, and collective life in São Paulo. Developed during Brazil’s political opening, the project asserts collective space as a site for the circulation of ideas and practices.

The exhibition includes icons such as the SESC Pompéia chair—still in use—alongside the Lareira and Igreja Uberlândia benches, and the Frei Egídio and Girafa chairs, highlighting an economy of means that refuses hierarchies between erudite and popular, drawing and improvisation.

One axis revisits the wooden mast structures (“pau-mastros”), an exhibition system inspired by Brazilian popular festivals. Suspending paintings in space, they break with the logic of the wall and propose a more open, relational experience. Chilean artist Felipe Mujica was invited to intervene in these structures.

The exhibition also brings together artists whose practices engage with body, space, and social inscription across the 1980s and the present, including Jota Mombaça, Martha Araújo, Rafael França, Hudinilson Jr., 3Nós3, and Rita Lessa.

By bringing Lina’s practice into proximity with these artists, the exhibition proposes a field of relations, activating her thinking in the present and rearticulating forms, uses, and narratives.