“Art on Display 1949-69”, an art show designed by the architect Jo Taillieu and inaugurated in Rotterdam on October 4, is an exhibition itinerary that focuses less on the works of art itself and more on the way they are presented. The exhibition brings together some of the most progressive post-war exhibition projects in the form of 1:1 reconstructions: Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini and Franca Helg, Lina Bo Bardi, Aldo van Eyck, Alison and Peter Smithson.

The period 1949-1969 was characterized by the search for a new relationship between art and the public, outlining new roles for art and cultural institutions. For example, the exhibition partially reworks Bo Bardi's famous 1968 exhibition project. The radical set up for the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) was a grid of over 100 easels, an experiment born with the aim of freeing the museum from its sacred atmosphere.

The exhibition includes works from the 18th and 19th centuries from the private collection of the Anglo-Armenian businessman and philanthropist Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian – never before exhibited in Holland – and works by Portuguese and British modern artists, including Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Terry Frost and John Hoyland, from the Modern Collection.