When someone says “Brazilian design,” the mind likely conjures organic, wood-hewn forms by midcentury masters in the order of Lina Bo Bardi, José Zanine Caldas, or Sergio Rodrigues. Such pieces are hallmarks of Brazilian modernism, a movement that started around the 1940s, as the country saw a surge of immigration, rapid urbanization, and, as a result, a basic need for everyday furniture. Without easy access to industrial staples like stainless steel, fiberglass, or plastic, designers found ways to manufacture goods using the country’s indigenous materials (wood, leather, wicker) and craft practices, rendering a more tactile brand of modernism that came to define the country, and, in particular, its bustling creative capital: São Paulo. But 75 years later, as pieces by Zanine Caldas go for five figures at auction and Bo Bardi chairs are placed on view at MoMA, a fresh crop of artists and designers is hard at work, eager to break with those traditions and write the city’s next chapter.
“It’s very refreshing seeing the younger generation looking outside the bubble of modernism, trying to do things differently,” says Brazilian-born Amauri Aguiar, who, as cofounder of New York–based Verso gallery, works with several emerging São Paulo firms. He, like many others, credits the irreverent, pioneering Estudio Campana, established in 1984, for planting the first formative seeds of this new school. “They started thinking about things differently,” he explains. “Not everything had to be made of wood. Not everything had to be modern.” Brothers Humberto and Fernando Campana made sofas out of stuffed animals and chairs out of recycled plastic tubes, coining a make-do spirit that characterizes the vibrant scene today.
Ian Diesendruck, who worked for the Campanas before setting out on his own, uses a Portuguese word to best describe that ethos: gambiarra. “It means reinventing things to fit a purpose,” he explains. For him, that’s turning trashed PET plastics into planters and more. For others, it might mean mixing sundry scraps into your ceramics, creating silver leaf from candy wrappers, or revamping a tried-and-true technique like woodworking with something fresh—like resin or bronze accents. For many of the talents in this story, such an ad-hoc, DIY approach developed while stuck at home or out of work during the pandemic, as shifts in their daily lives left them wanting to work with their hands.
Unlike their modernist predecessors, for this new generation functionality is not the primary concern. Rather, a vase, a table, or a chair can happily hover in the gray area between art and design, a space that young galleries are swiftly moving into. “We work mostly with artists that create unique utilitarian pieces as a result of their research,” says Lola Maria Tulle who opened her São Paulo gallery Aalvo in 2022, smartly showcasing the work of modernist masters like Bo Bardi and Rodrigues alongside contemporary talents, many of which keep studios in the same post-industrial Barra Funda neighborhood as the gallery. Right now, she says, the creative energy in São Paulo is unparalleled. “We passed through a really hard political time in Brazil with the pandemic and Bolsonaro,” she muses. “But you know how history works. After a sad time, art blooms.”
