Exponent of neoconcretism, a Brazilian artist who has shaken the basis of the 20th century art, transforming the observer in part of the work, wins his first solo exhibition in Germany. “Please touch.” The request, made in the 1960s by the Brazilian painter and sculptor Lygia Clark (1920-1988), challenged the conventions of art and relationships between artist, public and space. Now this invitation affects the glass room with a huge right foot of the New National Gallery (Neue Nationalgalerie) in Berlin. From this Friday (23/05) to 12 October, the museum receives a retrospective with about 120 works by the exponent of Brazilian neoconcretism, in its first solo exhibition in Germany.
This is also the first time that the museum, founded in 1968 and dedicated to the art of the 20th century, received a show from a non -European artist. Although late, the choice reveals a growing interest of European cultural institutions in art produced by Brazilian and South American women, such as the exhibition of the modernist Tarsila do Amaral (1886-773) in Paris, closed in February.
“Our goal is to show more artists, especially women, but also more artists from South America. Lygia Clark is such an important figure for the 20th century, and yes, it is time to make an exhibition here in Germany and present it to the general public. It is important to diversify our knowledge of the art of the twentieth century,” he told DW Irina Hiebert Gun.
The retrospective follows a chronological line, useful for understanding how the artist, despite drunk directly from the source of the European avant -garde, has created an initial and pioneer language. His first paintings from the late 1940s and early 1950s, when he studied in Paris with masters such as Fernand Léger, have a strong cubist influence, but it is already possible to glimpse his intention to dissolve the border between image and space.
Its decisive step in this direction was the creation of the concept of “organic line” – a stretch that does not delimit or separate the plans, but acts from living intermediate space. The “organic line” comes, for example, when two surfaces touch, like the frame and the screen, and the line that separates them is at the same time the line that unites them. This concept marks Lygia Clark’s transition from geometric concrete to a more sensitive and fluid approach to form and line.
“I think the most interesting for us was to see how quickly it has developed and has come to her artistic language,” said Maike Steinkamp, the other curator of the show.
The idea of ”organic line” was initially applied to the works “Discovery of the Organic Line”, 1954. The curators of the retrospective managed to collect the three paintings of this existing series, all from private collections – one from the stay of the singer Marisa Monte a Rio de Janeiro.
They were in Brazil two years ago for research and prospecting works. They had the help of Jones Bergamin, owner of The Art Exchange, the largest auction house in Brazil, and the Pinakotheke Max Perlingiro gallery, which was based on collectors in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo.
“This is one of Clark’s main efforts: he wanted to explore the space and leave the frame and be part of the room or human space, so to speak. So we wanted to show all this development,” said Steinkamp.
Participatory art
The concept has progressed to the series called “Against Relifs” and “Cocoons”, in which Clark’s work moves actually from the two -dimensional plan, to never return.
The poet Ferreira Gullar (1930-2016), who was also a critic of art and was the author of the neoconcretic manifesto, who conceptualized the artistic movement, said that it was inevitable that Clark’s works ended up leaving the wall completely and falling to the ground, becoming an “unexpected and unexpected creature”.
By fulfilling this “prophecy”, the most famous Clark sculptures, the “animals” so rich in emerging, which marked the end of their painting practice, arrived in 1959. They are metal structures in which folds, joints and shapes refer to the space and body of the viewer interactively, with infinite forms and the possibility of movement.
“When they ask me how many movements can do the animal, I reply: I don’t know anything about this, you don’t know anything about it; but he, he knows,” Clark wrote.
The contributions of the artist of Minas Gerais were decisive to the development of participatory art – unlike performative art -, placing the participants, not the artist, at the center of experience. Clark then tried to free the public from the passive behavior to which he had been conditioned until then.
In the retrospective of the new national gallery, there are original “animals” and replicas made to be managed by the public.
The body in the center
Clark’s following works were mostly composed of daily materials, “sensory objects” that allow the participation of anyone, everywhere. Attention becomes the relationship between individuals and objects created by Clark’s mediators only.
This is the case of “Shrool anthropophagic”, from 1969, in which a group is around a person and the copper of wires outside the mouth, the molasses of the saliva – something like a spider that involves its pasta in a cocoon.
This interactive aspect is very current, the curators observe. “I think it’s really that people like – they don’t want to look at objects anymore, but they want to interact and hear them in different ways,” said Steinkamp.
“I think there is a sort of desire to be in contact with one’s body,” added Grun.
The exhibition also enters the artistic phase of Clark’s therapy, in which it created relational objects such as shells, sandbag, stones, air plastic bag and cushions, to be used in therapeutic processes.
People are oriented to lie on a mattress and establish a connection between their unconscious and these objects, with, according to Clark, a healing power. At the end of the sessions, he asked the participants to describe the internal images that emerged during the treatment, recording them in writing.
He tried the process with the students and even showed him to the musician Caetano Veloso, visiting the Paris artist in 1970, when both were in exile in Europe during the Brazilian military dictatorship. The experience produced the song if you keep a stone.
The notion of body as a field of experimentation and expression was a point of convergence between Clark’s work and the tropicalist movement, which Caetano was part.
Brazil-European connection
The curator Irina Hiebert Grun made her doctorate in contemporary Brazilian art and knew Clark’s work well. Maike Steinkamp had been dedicated to the study of concrete European art and was not very familiar with the Brazilian neoconcrere movement, which has as other names of a prominent Helio Oiticica and Lygia Pape.
“I come from this European approach, I worked hard with Hans Arp and Sophie Tauber-Arp, both were exhibited at the first Biennale of San Paolo, in the early 1950s. I was very impressed by their influence in Brazil and then we started talking and we had to make an exhibition,” says Steinkamp.
“I think it was very rich for us to be left with such different corners – I don’t know much about Brazilian art and Irina with all her knowledge – and being able to understand that Liagia Clark also belongs to this place, to show between new traditions and Europe. There are so many European ties. There are so many European bonds.
For Alessandra Clark, grandson of the artist, who came to Berlin to help create the retrospective, there are many points of contact, so far unknown, among the works of contemporary Brazilian and European contemporary artists.
Remember, for example, of an exhibition, conducted by the Brazilian curator Paulo Herkenhoff, who put in parallel the art of Clark and that of the Polish artist Katarzyna Kobro.
“I think the woman is becoming a central point in art, she is well studied now. I think there will be no difference between gender or other. It’s just a matter of time.”
Source: Terra
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