,Ovo Launches Pieces and Collaborations at MASP’s New Building
On June 5, 2025, Luciana Martins’s and Gerson de Oliveira’s ,Ovo design studio will be occupying the multi-usage room at MASP’s Pietro Maria Bardi building to show new pieces and collaborations, as well as a selection of works that cover their trajectory. The new pieces include chairs, an armchair, and a family of benches—all of them recently created—together with two pieces developed from designs signed by great names in Brazilian architecture: Metro studio, responsible for designing the building; and Paulo Mendes da Rocha (1907-2012). In these pieces, we can attest the designers’ vocation to combine rigor, usability, and surprise elements. The show also exemplifies a desire of incorporating ideas and solutions coming from different contexts, namely architecture.
Attention to ergonomic quality is one of the characteristics that bring together ,Ovo’s new lines of products. Derived from the chair in the same collection, the Quadros (“Frames”) benches advance slight chromatic variations and graphic investigations that house the original line exploring the effects of asymmetries between seats and backs in different configurations. Born from the same family, the Quadros armchair distinguishes itself by the treatment given to its materials, conferring a soft, velvety aspect to their wooden bodies stressing the pieces’ vocation as a place of extreme comfort.
In the Dança (“Dance”) chairs, the backs are irregular hexagons with subtle variations framing reinvented rattan weavings. The design’s rigor contrasts with the handmade character of the complement, which turns itself away from its vernacular character without making explicit the material’s strongly evocative quality.
Collaborations
Going through and reshaping space, the sofa designed by Metro’s architects by invitation of ,Ovo reflects the studio’s central concern: to promote the collective use of spaces. Founded by Martin Corullon and Gustavo Cedroni, Metro was responsible, among countless projects, for the rehabilitation of the iconic glass easels created by Lina Bob Bardi for the exhibition of artworks at MASP and for the expography for the 30th São Paulo Biennial of Art, as well as for the design of the Pietro Maria Bardi building. Composed by concise upholstered modules that combine themselves into sinuous shapes highlighted by strategic uses of color, the sofa brings an architectural vision of space to ,Ovo’s catalog, adding to previously created pieces aimed at use in public spaces.
The piece that wraps up this set of launches is a chair designed by Paulo Mendes da Rocha, winner of the 2006 Pritzker Prize, finalized by ,Ovo in collaboration with Naná Mendes da Rocha, the designer responsible for the furniture work by the architect. In this chair, a steel seat/back rests on bearings fixed on circular legs. Each bearing transfers the weight of the person sitting on the chair to the structure below, which then bends to accommodate it. The project was adjusted from a prototype left by the architect, who created pieces such as the Paulista armchair and works known around the world such as his interventions at Pinacoteca de São Paulo and Estação da Luz.
These new pieces are complemented by an exhibition of iconic creations by ,Ovo that occupy the mezzanine of the space. Bringing back different facets of the production developed by the duo during over more than three decades, this show gathers furniture pieces that challenge the boundaries between art and design such as their metal, light, and fabric Vela (“Sail”) lamps and their sculptural series of stools Rio, in which iron structures support and exhibit large smooth rocks.