CONTEMPORARY ART IN A BOTANICAL GARDEN?

The Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim is a museum and contemporary art museum located in Brumadinho in southeast Brazil, founded by former mining magnate Bernardo Paz.


Beginning in the 1980s, Paz converted a 3,000-acre ranch into a sprawling botanical garden designed by the late landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx, a friend of Paz′s. Inhotim, now at 5,000 acres, is vast enough to require 1,000 employees. The garden, which boasts two dozen art “pavilions”, opened to the public in 2006. In 2011, it attracted nearly 250,000 visitors from all over the world.



The pavilions include more than 500 works by noted Brazilian and international artists, such as Hélio Oiticica, Yayoi Kusama, Anish Kapoor, Thomas Hirschhorn, Matthew Barney, Doug Aitken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Steve McQueen, Cildo Meireles and Vik Muniz. One pavilion is devoted to one of Paz′s ex-wives, the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão.Paz has plans to expand Inhotim with 10 or more new hotels, an 15,000-capacity amphitheater, and even a complex of “lofts” for those who want to live amid the collection.



https://vimeo.com/79258788


Source: WIKIPEDIA, INHOTIM´S OFFICIAL PAGE

EVER HEARD OF BURLE MARX?

Roberto Burle Marx (August 4, 1909, São Paulo – June 4, 1994, Rio de Janeiro) was a Brazilian landscape architect (as well as a painter, print maker, ecologist, naturalist, artist and musician) whose designs of parks and gardens made him world famous. He is accredited with having introduced modernist landscape architecture to Brazil. He was known as a modern nature artist and a public urban space designer.
Much of his work has a sense of timelessness and perfection. His aesthetics were often nature based, for example, never mixing flower colours, utilisation of big groups of the same specimen, using native plants and making a rocky field into a relaxing garden. He was very interested in each plant's character and what effect that has on the whole garden.
Source: Wikipedia

http://www.parqueburlemarx.com.br/

Sitio Roberto Burle Marx