Lygia Clark

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Lygia Clark

Lygia Clark (born October 23, 1920 in Belo Horizonte , Minas Gerais , † April 25, 1988 in Rio de Janeiro ) was a Brazilian painter , sculptor and installation artist . She is a pioneer in Brazilian interactive art.

life and work

Lygia Clark was born as Lygia Pimentel Lins in Belo Horizonte in 1920 into an aristocratic family and married a wealthy man at the age of 18. Between 1941 and 1945 she had 3 children and in 1947 she decided to become an artist. At the age of 27, she began studying with Roberto Burle Marx (1909–1994) and Zélia Salgado (1904–2009) in Rio de Janeiro . Lygia Clark went to Paris from 1950 to 1951 to deepen her knowledge with Fernand Léger (1881–1955), Árpád Szenes (1897–1985) and Isaac Dobrinsky (1891–1973).

Clark was with Hélio Oiticica a well-known founding member of the Brazilian artist group Neoconcretismo and was one of the signatories of the manifesto neoconcreto (Neoconcrete Manifesto) in 1959 . The first joint exhibition took place in March 1959 in Rio de Janeiro. The participating artists were Amilcar de Castro, Ferreira Gullar , Franz Weissman, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Reynaldo Jardim, and Theon Spanudis. Clark was friends with the Marxist art critic Mário Pedrosa (1900–1981).

After the 1964 coup , which was followed by the military dictatorship , Clark went into exile and lived in Paris from 1968 to 1976. There she was professor at the Sorbonne from 1972 to 1976 .

Lygia Clark devoted the first phase of her artistic activity to painting and sculpture. Clark's early works are achromatic monochrome paintings in black, white and gray. Later geometric abstractions are often also colored.

From 1963, with the work Caminhando / Gehend , Lygia Clark reoriented itself artistically and began to develop interactive objects and later interactive installations. She understands her Objeto Sensoriais as “living organisms” that acquire form and meaning when the viewer's body comes into contact with them. With the Bichos series , Clark challenges the recipient to be creative.

The extraordinary importance of Lygia Clark's late works lies in the fact that she overcomes the limitation of viewing art to sight and extends it to include hearing, feeling, smelling, touching, and the inclusion of physical experience through different postures. She also includes the experience of a period of time in her interactive conceptions. In this way her art becomes a subjective experience within the arrangement of a context. She expresses this claim, among other things, by calling her works of art “offers” and the viewers “participants”.

Clark's works after 1963 can only be sensually experienced by participants who manipulate them. Art museums, which traditionally do not allow touching works of art, have not always opened their doors to this type of experimental work, so that for a while there were hardly any new works by Clark in museum exhibitions. The late installations by the artist Lygia Clark, who died of a heart attack in 1988, are posthumously made accessible to a broad art audience.

Bichos / creatures / vermin (from 1959–1963)

The approximately seventy works in the Bichos series consist of handy, movable aluminum disks, triangles, squares or circular segments made of stainless steel, aluminum or are gold-plated. The individual elements are connected by hinges and are intended to be redesigned as desired by the viewer / participant.

Máscaras Sensoriais / Sensual Masks (1967)

This series of work pieces consists of colored hoods / masks into which seeds, herbs, but also obstacles that impair vision or elements that produce noise are sewn.

A casa é o corpo / The house is the body (1968)

The house is the body is a walk-in installation by Lygia Clark. “A curtain of black, tightly stretched rubber bands leads to a dark chamber. The floor feels soft. You have the feeling that it is starting to wobble. It continues through a second curtain made of elastic bands. Now you run through balloons. Then a plastic tent. A fan goes on and off again after a while. Crouching and crawling the path leads to the next dark room. Here they are small plastic balls that are spread out on the floor. You step out through a last curtain, this time made of colorful cotton cords - and see yourself in a distorted mirror. "

Baba Antropofágica / cannibalistic saliva (1973)

Baba Antropofágica is an interactive performance conceived by Lygia Clark , in which actors pull saliva-colored thread out of their mouths (like spiders from their bodies) and use it to wrap a person lying on the ground in a dense cocoon, which they later remove again together.

Exhibitions (selection)

Awards (selection)

  • 1958 and 1960 Guggenheim International Award

literature

  • Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art by Sergio Bessa, Cornelia Butler, Luis Pérez-Oramas, Lygia Clark, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014 (English) ISBN 978-0-87070-8-909
  • Lygia Clark by Guy Brett, Manuel J. Borja-Villel , Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1997 ISBN 978-8-48878-6-203
  • The Desire for Form, O Desejo da Forma: Neoconcretismo and Contemporary Brazilian Art. Akademie der Künste, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-88331-162-3 (exhibition catalog, September 3 to November 7, 2010, Academy of the Arts). In it Lygia Clark: pp. 86–91 (illustrations), pp. 174–183 (texts).

Documentation

  • 1984 Memory of the Body, by Eduardo Clark
  • 1973 The World of Lygia Clark, with Anna Maria Maiolino

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Deutschlandradio Kultur Between Concept Art and Healing, accessed on June 14, 2015
  2. ↑ a b The New York Times, Roberta Smith : See Me. Feel Me. Maybe Drool on Me. Accessed on June 26, 2015 (English)
  3. ↑ What You Won't Find at MoMA's Lygia Clark Show: Lygia Clark accessed on June 14, 2015 (English)
  4. ^ First printing: Jornal do Brasil , Sunday supplement of March 22, 1959. German translation in: Hot Spots. Rio de Janeiro / Torino - Milano / Los Angeles, 1956 to 1969. Kunsthaus Zürich, Steidl, Göttingen 2008, pp. 33–37.
  5. ↑ a b BBC culture Jason Farago: Lygia Clark: Nice to look at, lovely to hold, accessed on June 14, 2015
  6. ↑ universes in universe documenta X accessed on June 14, 2015
  7. ↑ Manifesta Journal Archive for a Work-Event: Activating the Body's Memory of Lygia Clark's Poetics and its Context / Part 1 accessed on June 14, 2015 (English)
  8. ↑ Transversal Texts, Suely Rolnik: The memory of the body contaminated the museum accessed on June 14, 2015
  9. ^ Die Zeit, Sebastian Preuss: Lygia Clark's humanistic creatures with swinging hips, accessed on June 14, 2015
  10. ↑ Interartive, Christina Grammatikopoulou: The Therapeutic Art of Lygia Clark accessed on June 14, 2015 (English)
  11. ↑ Schirn Magazin, Alexander Jürgs: Art for all the senses: Installations by Lygia Clark accessed on June 14, 2015
  12. ↑ Media Art Net Lygia Clark Baba antropofágica accessed on June 14, 2015
  13. ↑ documenta X short guide. Ostfildern 1997, ISBN 3-89322-938-8 , page 44
  14. ↑ Frieze, Vivian Rehberg: Lygia Clark ( Memento from June 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) accessed on June 14, 2015 (English)
  15. ↑ Schirn: Brasiliana. Installations from 1960 to today ( Memento from June 28, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) accessed on June 14, 2015
  16. ↑ Alison Jacques Gallery: Lygia Clark accessed on June 10, 2015 (English)
personal data
SURNAME Clark, Lygia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lins, Lygia Pimentel (maiden name); Clark, Lígia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Brazilian painter, sculptor and installation artist
DATE OF BIRTH October 23, 1920
PLACE OF BIRTH Belo Horizonte , Minas Gerais
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 1988
Place of death Rio de Janeiro