Aberto’s first international show celebrates Brazilian design in Paris at a modernist gem

Le Corbusier first went to Rio de Janeiro in 1929, finding the city ‘violent and sublime’. The Swiss-French architect maintained a connection with Brazil for the rest of his life. He travelled there by Zeppelin, drew up disruptive urban plans for Rio and São Paulo (neither realised), worked with modernists Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, and designed the Maison du Brésil in Paris (making so many changes to Costa's original plans that the Brazilian removed himself from the project). His final commission was to design the French embassy for the new capital of Brasilia, though it was cut short by his death in 1965.

And yet the connection continues. As part of ‘France-Brazil Season 2025’, a year of cultural exchange, the Maison La Roche, which houses the Fondation Le Corbusier, is hosting the first international show by Brazilian exhibition platform Aberto.

Aberto was founded in 2022 by art consultant Filipe Assis, after he learned that the only Niemeyer-designed house in São Paulo had been put up for sale by the family who commissioned it in 1974. Like many modernist houses in Brazil, it was not landmarked or protected, and could easily be torn down. ‘I wanted to try to give a new purpose to these modern houses,’ Assis recalls. ‘I saw that there was a potential to do an art event, to bring awareness.’

He worked with curators Kiki Mazzucchelli and Claudia Moreira Salles (also a designer) to create the first Aberto exhibition at the house, showing national and international artworks in dialogue with Niemeyer's work. It worked: the family has since kept the house as an event space.

The team put together two subsequent editions of Aberto in other hidden architectural gems around São Paulo (including a little-known 1970s brutalist house by Chu Ming Silveira). After attracting more than 20,000 visitors last year, they decided to take the concept to Europe. Assis says, ‘Paris was the main choice because of Le Corbusier's rich relationship with Brazil.’

Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret designed the Maison La Roche in the 1920s for Swiss banker and art collector Raoul La Roche. With its open concept, ribbon windows and a colour palette of 17 gradient shades, it's a striking setting for Aberto4, which brings together contemporary and 20th-century Brazilian artists.

Some of them are big names, such as Beatriz Milhazes, who currently has a solo show at the Guggenheim in New York. Her vibrantly colourful collage at Maison La Roche includes Chanel ribbons and chocolate wrappers, and shares a hallway with a Le Corbusier collage from 1958.

Another important contemporary figure, Luiz Zerbini, welcomes visitors into the entrance hall with a painting of a decrepit modernist building in the Brazilian city of Recife, its coloured façade reminiscent of Le Corbusier's Cité Radieuse. Zerbini's painting is one of several works created for this show. Many are for sale, which helps to finance the project.

Raoul La Roche's private gallery is the largest room in the house, with a dramatic interior ramp and wall-length, sheet-metal lighting that also serves as a sun shield. It displays a selection of artists from Brazil's concretist and neo-concretist movements, which began in the late 1940s. On a table sits one of Lygia Clark's ‘Bichos’, or ‘Critters’, a hinged metal sculpture. Guest curator Lauro Cavalcanti says that, in the same way Le Corbusier believed sculpture should be ‘listened to’, Clark created these works to be unstable, and ‘activated’ by the viewer (though touching is discouraged).

Up the ramp, in the library, hangs an abstract work by Luísa Matsushita, who spent years singing under the name Lovefoxxx with a Brazilian indie band, and now paints full-time. Her painting for Aberto4 has sensuous organic forms and colour blocks in the shades of Maison La Roche. ‘She wanted to do something fluid, in contrast with the rigid architecture of the house,’ says Mazzucchelli.

A nearby wall shows a textured canvas in rich reds and browns by António Tarsis, who grew up poor in a favela in Salvador. Since his teenage years, he's been collecting discarded objects, which he cuts and dyes, then pastes to form grids with colour variations. ‘His work talks about found materials, recycling, his personal story,’ explains Mazzucchelli. ‘It's incredible what you can make with matchboxes.’

Also hanging in the library is a work by Sidival Fila, who creates art with a different kind of found object: antique textiles. Fila is a Franciscan friar from Brazil who lives in Rome. In his spare time, he meticulously sews old fabric, much of it liturgical, to create structural volumes on canvas frames. Until recently under the radar, he is now represented by Paris gallerist Kamel Mennour, and he donates 100 per cent of his proceeds to charity.

In the dining room, sunlight caresses the sinuous lines of Maria Martins' bronze sculpture, inspired by tree roots in the Amazon and lent to the show by a museum in Brazil. Martins was an important early 20th-century artist who lived in Paris for a time as the wife of a Brazilian diplomat. She was also Marcel Duchamps' lover. ‘He was crazy about her,’ Mazzucchelli says.

On the floor above, works by two major Brazilian names, Anna Maria Maiolino (soon to have a show at the Musée Picasso) and Tunga, grace La Roche's surprisingly modest bedroom. Next door in the dressing room, the sculptor Erika Verzutti is showing three stoneware ceramic sculptures cast from jackfruit, with bumpy skin and smooth interiors, inspired by pencils, Barbara Hepworth and architecture. ‘I call them ‘Brasilias,’’ she explains, ‘because they are Niemeyeresque.’ (As for Le Corbusier, Verzutti says that Brazilians have ‘internalised’ him.)

Aberto4 runs until 8 June, but already, the team are planning upcoming editions. They are considering a 1970s spherical house by architect Eduardo Longo in São Paulo, as well as Niemeyer's Fondazione Mundadori in Milan. It's a pretty sure thing the event will be warmly welcomed wherever it goes. As Le Corbusier wrote in a 1962 letter, ‘Brazil is one of those hospitable and generous places that one likes to be able to call a friend’.

Aberto4 runs until June 8 2025, aberto.art