Lygia Clark

Lygia Pimentel Lins (23 October 1920 – 25 April 1988), better known as Lygia Clark, was a Brazilian artist best known for her painting and installation work.

She was often associated with the Brazilian Constructivist movements of the mid-20th century and the Tropicalia movement.

Along with Brazilian artists Amilcar de Castro, Franz Weissmann, Lygia Pape and poet Ferreira Gullar, Clark co-founded the Neo-Concrete movement.

Clark was born in 1920 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

In 1938, she married Aluízio Clark Riberio, a civil engineer, and moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she gave birth to three children between 1941 and 1945.

In 1947, she studied painting with Brazilian landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and became an artist.

Between 1950 and 1952, she studied with Isaac Dobrinsky, Fernand Léger and Arpad Szenes in Paris.

Like many intellectuals of the 1950s and 60s, Clark was in therapy herself, and the propositions she was developing explored the frontier between art, therapy, and life.

In 1953, she became one of the founding members of Rio's Frente group of artists.

In 1957, Clark participated in Rio de Janeiro's first National Concrete Art Exhibition.

Clark soon became a prime figure among the Neo-concretists, whose 1959 manifesto called for abstract art to be more subjective and less rational and idealist.

From 1960 on, Clark discovered ways for viewers (who would later be referred to as "participants") to interact with her art works.

Clark's work dealt with the relationship between inside and outside, and, ultimately, between self and world.

In 1960 she began to make her famous Bichos (Critters), hinged objects that could take many shapes and were meant to be physically manipulated by the viewer in 1964 she began developing "propositions" anyone could enact using everyday materials like paper, plastic bags, and elastic.

She drew on the writings of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology resonated with the intertwining of subject and object she sought in her breakthrough work of the 1960s.

Later in her career, her more holistic works displayed influences from experiences she had with psychotic and neurotic patients.

In 1964, Clark began her Nostalgia of the Body series with the intention of abandoning the production of art objects in order to create art that was rooted in the senses.

The Nostalgia of the Body works relied on participant's individual experiences occurring directly in their bodies.

These pieces addressed the simultaneous existence of opposites within the same space: internal and external, metaphorical and literal, male and female.

After 1966, Clark claimed to have abandoned art.

Her 1966 work Diálogo de mãos [Dialogue of Hands], a collaboration with Hélio Oiticica, bound together two participants' hands with a stretchy Möbius strip, and the movements of the two bodies created a cascade of stimuli and embodied response.

Also in 1966, Clark created Pedra e ar [Stone and Air], a pebble perched upon a small plastic bag filled with air.

The pressure of viewers' hands would cause the pebble to dance.

Art critic Guy Brett observed that Clark "produced many devices to dissolve the visual sense into an awareness of the body."

Clark's later works focused heavily on the unconscious senses: touch, hearing and smell.

In her 1966 work, Breathe With Me, Clark formed a rubber tube into a circle and invited participants to hold the tube next to their ear.

The participants could hear the sound of air entering and exiting the tube, which produced an individual sensory experience for each participant.

Clark is one of the most established artists associated with the Tropicália movement.

Clark explored the role of sensory perception and psychic interaction that participants would have with her artwork.

An example of Clark's fascination with human interaction is her 1967 piece O eu e o tu (The I and the You). The piece consists of two industrial rubber suits joined by an umbilical-like cord.

The participants wearing the suits would be joined but unable to see one another, forming an almost psycho-sexual bond between the two.

Clark said of her pieces, "What's important is the act of doing in the present; the artist is dissolved into the world."

During the early part of Clark's career, she focused on creating small monochromatic paintings which were done in black, gray, and white.

During Brazil's military dictatorship, Clark self-exiled to Paris, where in the 1970s she taught art classes at the Sorbonne.

During this time, Clark also explored the idea of sensory perception through her art.

Her art became a multi-sensory experience in which the spectator became an active participant.

In 1977, Clark returned to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and she died of a heart attack in her home in 1988.

Clark's early works were influenced by the Constructivist movement and other forms of European geometric abstraction, including the work of Max Bill, though she soon departed from the detached rationalism of much abstract art.

Clark's early work reflected her interest in psychoanalysis, including the research of Sigmund Freud.

Between 1979 and 1988, Clark moved toward art therapy, using her objects in interactive sessions with patients.