Veronika Kellndorfer

From Copacabana Beach in Rio de Janeiro to Biscayne Boulevard in Miami Beach, throughout Brazil and around the world, the innovative and prolific work of Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) has made him one of the most prominent landscape architects of the twentieth century. The son of a German-Jewish father and a Brazilian mother Burle Marx embraced modernism in the early 1930s, as the movement was taking hold in his country among artists and intellectuals. Using abstraction as his guiding principle, and grand sweeps of voluminous local foliage and colourful flora, Burle Marx devised a new form of landscape expression, revolutionizing garden design. Throughout a more than sixty-year career, Burle Marx designed over 2,000 gardens worldwide and discovered close to fifty plant species, and made paintings and objects of exuberant, rare beauty.