Sao Paulo’s MASP Opens Much-Awaited, $43.5 M. Expansion with Exhibitions Mining Its Institutional History

Since 1968, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo has commanded attention on the city’s bustling Avenida Paulista for its iconic modernist building, a red-pillar, suspended structure designed by architect Lina Bo Bardi. After more than six years of planning and construction, a new 14-floor building with an additional 82,600 square feet of space, will join it, an expansion effort that will increase MASP’s exhibition space by 66 percent.

At a cost of almost $43.5 million, all obtained through private donations, this much-awaited annex, which opens to the public March 28, represents MASP’s first expansion since its moved to Avenida Paulista, giving the museum 235,300 square feet to work with, more than double its original footprint. The original building, too, has been renamed after Bo Bardi, with the new building carrying the name of Pietro Maria Bardi, the museum’s first artistic director and the architect’s husband.

Located across a side street and soon to be connected via an underground tunnel, the high-rise Pietro building, with its black, perforated and pleated metal sheet shell, is a sharp contrast to the long rectangular Lina structure. The exterior “acts as a protective ‘skin’” for the artistic treasures inside, controlling the incidence of natural light and reducing internal heating as a way to reduces its thermal load and increase its energy efficiency, according to Martin Corullon, of the building’s architectural firm, Metro Arquitetos Associados.

For MASP artistic director Adriano Pedrosa, who reinstated Bo Bardi’s iconic glass-and-concrete easel installation for the museum’s permanent collection shortly after joining in 2014, the expansion project respects the language of the main building and collaborates with—instead of detracting from— its magnificence.

“It’s really not supposed to be as grand as Lina’s brilliant building; it doesn’t wish to compete with it,” Pedrosa, who was also curator of the 2024 Venice Biennale, told ARTnews. “I think it was very gracious of the architects not to attempt to compete with the extraordinary landmark that is the Lina Bo Bardi building.” 

But the main goal of the new Pietro building is to improve the overall visitor experience to MASP. The first floor will serve as a visitor reception area, which the Lina building does not currently have. The underground passage, which will open later this year, will also improve public circulation between the two spaces, as visitors won’t have to cross the street to get from one building to the other. (It will also be used to transport artworks between both buildings.)

“The Pietro is completely focused on the public,” Paulo Vicelli, MASP’s director of experience and communications, told ARTnews. “When we have this tunnel, the experience will be even better.”

Of the 14 floors at the new building, five will be dedicated as exhibition spaces, while the other floors will serve as flexible spaces that can be used for seminars, classes, lectures, and even additional exhibitions. MASP School, which offers art history and critical studies to the public, will get its own dedicated floor, and another floor will be for a conservation lab, both of which much the museum has lacked.

For the inauguration of the Pietro building, Pedrosa said he and his curators chose five exhibitions that “propose new perspectives and dialogues on the museum’s collection and evolution.”

Each occupying their own floor, or about 3,200 square feet of space, the exhibitions have been dubbed as “Five essays on MASP,” with three exhibitions that focus on the museum itself: one on its history; one on its collection of African arts; and one dedicated to works of geometric abstraction, one of Brazil’s main art historical movements. The other two will be single-artist exhibitions: 13 works by Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir, which MASP acquired early in its history, and a 2019 video installation by contemporary artist Isaac Julien that focuses on Bo Bardi.

“Histories of MASP” revisits more than 77 years of the museum’s past, reflecting on its contribution to modern art and museology. Photographs and documents, dating back as far as 1947 when the museum occupied a floor of the media conglomerate building owned by MASP cofounder and early benefactor Assis Chateaubriand in the city’s center, are organized via a detailed timeline that also includes a photograph of Queen Elizabeth II at the opening ceremony of MASP at Avenida Paulista.

“The exhibition is quite fascinating, particularly for those visitors who want to know more about the museum and understand its history at a time that is really a turning point for the museum’s history,” Pedrosa said.

The Julien installation, titled “Lina Bo Bardi – A Marvellous Entanglement,” complements the “Histories” show, looking at the legacy of Lina Bo Bardi, whose architectural vision has in many ways shaped the kind of museum MASP has become over its nearly eight decades of existence. In the 2019 video, actresses Fernanda Montenegro and 2025 Golden Globe–winner Fernanda Torres interpret Lina’s writings, giving voice to her ideas about the potential of art.

To highlight MASP’s collection of European art, the largest in the Latin America, the museum chose to revisit an exhibition from two decades ago, but with a twist. The 12 paintings by Renoir are mounted on a half metal and half glass easel, an update to Bo Bardi’s well-known glass easel displays by architect Juliana Godoy. Pedrosa wanted Godoy “to think of a different kind of easel display” as Bo Bardi’s easel display “quite severe, rigorous.” The end result, he said, is “a very playful, rather whimsical” version of Bo Bardi’s version which can be viewed in the original building. 

The more than 50 works on view, all now part of the permanent collection and mostly acquired over the past two years, brings together artists from different periods, backgrounds, and movements, such as Lygia Clark (1920–88), Amilcar de Castro (1920–2002), Alfredo Volpi (1896–1988), and Rubem Valentim (1922–91), in dialogue with contemporary artists like Sarah Morris, Daiara Tukano, and Lydia Okumura.

“Arts from Africa” is in a way a middle ground between MASP’s historical collecting practices and its future. MASP has collected traditional African art since its beginning and mounted major exhibitions on art from the continent throughout its history; two gifts, in 1998 and 2012, added to these holdings. But the 40 works in “Arts from Africa” primarily focuses on pieces from West Africa made in the 20th century, including statuettes, everyday objects, dolls, drums, furniture, and masks.

While the five inaugural shows in the Pietro building all draw heavily on MASP’s permanent collection, that won’t always be the case. After these shows go off view in August, the galleries will be focused on temporary loan exhibitions. For Pedrosa the additional space for exhibitions will come in handy, not only to show MASP collections but also for showing temporary loan exhibitions.

“We’ve had the same 2,000 square meters [21,500 square feet] of exhibition space for the collections for almost 60 years, so we thought it would be important to have more space to show the collections,” Pedrosa said, noting that the Lina building’s two sub-levels, where its temporary shows have historically been, will eventually be devoted to the collection. 

When asked if the new building would solve the lack of space for exhibitions, Pedrosa chuckled, adding “That problem is never really solved. Maybe now we are going from 1 percent to 1.3 percent of the collection on view, but percentage is not really the way to take things into consideration.” 

With a newly expanded MASP, Pedrosa sees the possibilities as endless both for its acclaimed exhibition program, including its “Histórias” series, and mining the depths of its singular holdings.

“We were fortunate that Pietro Maria had an incredible eye for artworks,” he said. “Now we have wonderful possibilities to organize more exhibitions, with better galleries and to welcome people in a more comfortable manner.”