Lygia Clark

(Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1920-Rio de Janeiro, 1988)

Plastic artist, key figure of concretism and geometric abstraction. Presenting painting as an experimental field, Clark sought to redefine the medium by expanding the limits of traditional painting. He dedicated himself to art without having specific official training, he integrated into the artistic environment of Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 1940s and participated in fundamental movements, such as Concrete Art and Geometric Abstraction, throughout the 1940s. 1950. He began in his country in 1948 in figuration with oil paintings and charcoal drawings of traditional themes such as portraiture, still life, landscape and architecture, and he evolved and schematized his works more and more, approaching the abstraction. In 1950, Lygia Clark moved to Paris, where during a two-year stay she trained and briefly studied painting with artists such as Fernand Léger and Áspád Szenes and began making flattened modular compositions of prismatic geometries and sharp triangular shapes filled with color. Upon her return to Brazil, she began creating beautiful geometric compositions and other important pictorial series that prompted her to question the spatial conventions of the plane, such as "Discovery of the Organic Line" (1954) and "Breaking the Frame (1954)", which were can be seen in the exhibition. At this time, Clark also carried out research on the relationship between art and architecture that would later be reflected in the easel paintings of smooth, flat and modular structures that make up his series "Modulated Surfaces" (1955). Oil paint will give way to industrial painting and the color planes will be assembled producing delicate reliefs. The multiple variations that he hosts under the name Planes on Modulated Surface, (1957-1958) or Modulated Spaces (1958) or his famous Contra relief (1959) are the most notable emblems of his experimental adventure. He expanded his formal experimentations beyond his pieces towards transversal actions and dialogues with the exhibition space and the affections of the bodies and the experience of the public. After his series Capullos (1958), in 1960 he began another that he called Bichos: sculptures that can be manipulated and reconfigured by the public. The pragmatic, performative and psychoanalytic drifts will shape his subsequent investigations with the consequent crisis in the notions of authorship.