The first comprehensive exhibition in Germany of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s work was recently held at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The retrospective, covering nearly forty years in chronological order, stayed true to the artist’s convictions and practice, and provided a space for the interactions she had envisioned.
Three years after beginning her studies in painting, Clark (1920–1988, born Lygia Pimentel Lins) creates her first oil paintings in Paris between 1950 and 1952 in the studio of Hungarian-born Árpád Szenes, then studies under Isaac Dobrinsky and Fernand Léger. After returning to Rio de Janeiro, she creates works influenced by geometric abstraction as a member of the Grupo Frente group. Her desire to create sensuality, which would later define her entire career, is already detectable in her works in this time period.
Her color compositions consciously transcend their mathematical aspects and evoke moods, landscapes, and feelings. She often uses soft pastel colors to counterbalance the angularity of shapes, then in the mid-1950s she introduces the concept of organic line, which, as one of the cornerstones of her art, shifts her works toward spatiality. The line is both autonomous, and a means of creating a connection with the immediate environment of the painting, the plane of the wall. The frame and the artwork, as well as the lines separating its panels, become fundamental elements of the work, eliminating the boundaries between their own and the third dimension.
Plasticity is also interpreted in its original sense. Clark creates architectural models, some of which depict spaces of residential buildings. Her series Modulated Surfaces can also be linked to this practice, in which geometric elements appear on the pictorial surface in car paint. Through her use of industrial matter, she places the emphasis on the materiality of the work rather than the artistic activity, transforming her mostly black-and-white works into reliefs. From here, we are only a stone’s throw away from perhaps the best-known chapter of her oeuvre, in which the wall as an installation element also disappears, allowing her works to truly come to life.
One of the catalysts for this breakthrough was the Neo-Concrete Movement, which defined itself in opposition to non-figurative geometric artistic modes (De Stilj, constructivism, suprematism). Its founders and pioneering members included Lygia Pape and Hélio Oiticica, who believed that the transcendental visual language that concrete art sought to achieve could not be attained through purely rational, objective, and mathematical processes. Their manifesto, written by Ferreira Gullar, describes the work of art as an organic, living entity that is not limited to the sum of its physical elements. The movement’s active period from 1959 through 1961 can be defined as the mid-point of the artist’s career and is also of particular importance in the history of South American modernism.
During this time, Clark workes on creating an expressive space and spatiality whose perceptibility not only brings the artwork to life, but also prompts the viewer to perceive themselves and recognize their own physical being. Examples of this include the Matchbox structures, which simultaneously bear the characteristics of modulated surfaces and architectural models. It is not only space, but also the perception of the community and shared existence of humanity that becomes the focus of her work at this time, which keeps becoming more prevalent in her works. She expresses her pursuit of interactivity in the Critter series, literally in the most tangible way, while also indicating the themes of the second half of her artistic practice.
This turning point is also reflected in the exhibition display. Clark’s critter-creatures, which despite their playfulness embody the rigor of constructivism, rest on podiums of varying heights, awaiting their audience. The replicas, which are identical to the originals in material, size, and function, are mobile and reveal themselves based on the viewers’ own experiences. The names of the entities (mostly broad, referring to constructions or animals) provide a starting point for the visual identification of Clark’s original idea, while their transformation or renaming also leaves room for creativity.
In the moving of the artworks, we can also discover how Clark sets elements in motion that she had previously depicted statically in two and then three dimensions. The organic lines come to life and shed new light on the possible relationship between the artwork and its environment. The “walking” of pocket critters also evokes the tradition of animism and of magical realism associated with Latin America in both literature and the visual arts. This emphasizes the different notion of participating: while in an exhibition space we usually think of the relationship between the viewer and the object, Clark’s works affect the viewers as independent entities and expand the scope of interpretation.
In the section following Critters, a series of tools and objects of different materials and formats related to Clark’s experiments and performative works are on display. The dialogue between the viewer and the work continues at these stations. How do we feel during different perceptions? What is our relationship to the object we hold or wear? What does the material, form, and smell of the object refer to? Does it remind us of something?
As examples, the organic form and materiality of the paper strips evoking Larvae or the wearable rubber object make their sensuality more concrete, transforming the previously possible interactions into a phenomenological experiment. The latter is a replica of one of the Soft Works, in which the organic line bends, forms a spiral, and takes on the alien body of the exhibition-goer. By activating the artwork, the viewers become involved, sensing the interaction between the two bodies; the foreign and their own. Perhaps the greatest merit of the exhibition is that it vividly conveys the tactility and playfulness of Lygia Clark’s art, which is also reflected in the reactions of visitors.
In line with the characteristics of interactive works, the scale of audience performativity is broad, but the sense of collectivity remains constant. This remains true when we are simply touching exhibited artworks or their replicas side by side, and even when we witness strangers reliving their journey from conception to birth in the immersive installation The House is the Body, originally created for the 1968 Venice Biennale.
In an environment where the viewer can manage dozens of sensory impressions, a half-hour video work or even descriptions illustrated with objects presenting Clark’s later artistic period hardly reach our stimulus threshold. This section of the timeline-based display focuses on performance and the relationship between multiple viewers, and was greatly influenced by avant-garde psychology. Based on Clark’s suggestions, participants experiment with various elastic bands, threads, and natural materials. According to the artist, the interactions and connections between different bodies create temporary, organic works, which she called living structures or biological architecture. The goal of these communal experiences is to create a collective body, which initiates processes that can change the body and mind, ultimately resulting in a holistic identity in which the object becomes the subject.
One such performance was Anthropophagic Saliva (1969), in which the performers took a spool of thread into their mouths and continuously pulled out the threads, which slowly covered a person lying in the middle of the group. Once all the spools had been unwound, the other participants also covered themselves with the organically woven web. By covering their faces and pulling the jointly created structure over themselves, they turn themselves inside out and become a collective entity in which, as Clark states, various feelings emerge and can have a therapeutic effect, along with the exchange and communication of bodily fluids.
Clark also refers to the practice of anthropophagy as mutual cannibalism, which is also expressed in her work Cannibalism (1969). This time, the person lying in the middle wears a dress filled with fruit, from which the others eat blindfolded. Cannibalism has a long history in Brazilian cultural history, and in the 20th century it became a symbol of opposition to colonialism and the formation of an independent Brazilian cultural identity.
After establishing and stabilizing the concept of collective identity, Clark turns her attention to the individual’s relationship with themself. In her final years, she works on a series entitled Structuring the Self, which is less an artistic endeavor than a therapeutic practice. Perhaps this is why the stage-like display erected to present it in the final segment of the exhibition seems so weightless.
Combining her own experiences, psychoanalytic knowledge, and the concept of the body established in her art, she conducts months of individual treatments in her apartment, working to make her clients aware of their bodies, fantasies, traumas, and desires. She uses everyday objects such as stones, seashells, and bags of various weights and materials, placing these on her clients’ bodies while they are in a state of rest during the session. Some of these objects also appear in her earlier works, but they return in a new role. Their perception and the following interactions become internalized and appear not as a goal but as a tool.
Lygia Clark’s participatory art transforms viewers into active subjects who enter the expressive space she has created. Through the art of blurring and redrawing the boundaries between foreign bodies, she creates autonomous and collective units that transcend media and mutually define each other.