Oficina Brennand
Oficina Cerâmica Francisco Brennand
Interesting facts
- The chapel on the grounds was completed in 2006 by Paulo Mendes da Rocha, the same year he won the Pritzker Prize.
- Mendes da Rocha built the chapel inside the roofless brick ruins of a 19th-century building, keeping the old walls as its shell.
- Brennand and Mendes da Rocha were contemporaries and longtime friends, and the chapel was a personal commission from the artist.
- The workshop stands on the former Engenho Santos Cosme e Damião, an old sugar plantation in the historic Várzea neighbourhood.
- The Brennand family traces its roots to an Irish ancestor who settled in Recife in 1820 and entered the sugar business.
- In 1971, the year he began rebuilding the factory, Brennand also showed twelve paintings at the São Paulo Biennial.
- Brennand represented Brazil at the 44th Venice Biennale in 1990 and had a major retrospective in Berlin in 1993.
- For Brazil's 500th anniversary in 2000 he created the Sculpture Park at Recife's Marco Zero, with over 90 works and a 32-metre Crystal Tower.
- His imagery drew on Greco-Roman mythology, literature, fauna and flora, and critics described it as Dionysian, subterranean and sexual.
- When Brennand died in December 2019 at the age of 92, the state of Pernambuco declared three days of official mourning.
Why it is worth it
In the western outskirts of Recife, a former brick and tile works has been turned into one artist's walled universe of glazed ceramic: temples, courtyards and pools crowded with eggs, birds, serpents, fertility figures and towering columns. The Oficina Brennand is the studio and museum of Francisco Brennand (1927–2019), the Pernambuco sculptor and painter often called Brazil's greatest ceramicist. Around 2,000 of his works fill its open halls, gardens and shrines, set among remnants of Atlantic Forest beside the Capibaribe River.
The site has a family history. In 1917 Brennand's father, the industrialist Ricardo Brennand, founded a ceramics factory, the Cerâmica São João da Várzea, on the lands of an old sugar estate in the Várzea district. Francisco was sent to Europe to learn ceramic techniques, and in Paris from 1949 he discovered the ceramic work of Picasso, Miró and Léger, which turned him towards clay. In 1971 he returned to the ruins of his father's factory and began rebuilding it as a working studio that produced tiles as well as his own sculpture. Most of the large pieces that inhabit the compound were made between 1975 and 1985, and the place kept changing for the rest of his life.
The complex is less a museum than an architectural environment. Among its spaces are the Accademia gallery of paintings, an amphitheatre, a sculpture hall, the Central Temple, a Temple of Sacrifice and a chapel designed by the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha, with gardens laid out by Roberto Burle Marx. Brennand's recurring themes are the origin of life and the permanence of things, expressed through the body, the egg, animals and fruit, and his work was sometimes attacked as too erotic. The New York Times once described the Oficina as a metaphor for Recife, growing and decaying at the same time. Recife, capital of Pernambuco, is one of Brazil's oldest cities, built where rivers meet the Atlantic.
Getting there
The Oficina Brennand is in the Várzea district of Recife, in Pernambuco state, close to the boundary with Camaragibe, which is about 3 km away. Recife/Guararapes–Gilberto Freyre International Airport (REC) is about 10 km away in a straight line.
Plan your visit
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Nearby places
- Capela Dourada 10.7 km · church
On these lists
-8.05160, -34.97350per Wikidata