Roberto’s House

“In the future, they will see that it was not a house which was lived in simply”, Roberto Burle Marx once said. Well, the future has arrived and there was really nothing simple about the house where the landscaper lived for the last twenty years of his life, carrying out botanical experiments and cultivating the arts and friendships.

To enable a closer experience and translate the “poetic emotions” of Burle Marx, Roberto’s House is open to visitors as of November 2019, with a new curatorship and remodelled exhibition.

The visitation circuit seeks to reveal the personality and life of Roberto Burle Marx, presenting the landscaper’s collection, the architectural features of the house and the botanical elements of the surroundings, in a narrative which gives emphasis to poetic and experimental freedom through emotion.

The visiting circuit includes the ceramics room, with items from the Jequitinhonha Valley, woodworks and paintings; the music room, with a grand piano and display cabinets which hold the pre-Colombian art collection; the living room, with his paintings and furniture, which have as a theme the valorisation of colonial, native and popular Latin American traditions; the oratory room; the dining room, where Burle Marx gathered with friends and whose display cabinets contain collections of crystal and glassware, as well as a broad range of his rich artistic production; the guest room, with its personal objects and documents, as well as the shell collection; the guest room hall, which contains objects produced by African populations and a lavishly tiled bathroom; the kitchen, from which delicious culinary production emerged for banquets; a varanda, Burle Marx’s preferred space for painting; and the landscaper’s new studio, inside the residence.

All of the elements of the exhibition point to the direction of an artist at once singular, universal and multifaceted.