BERLIN — Lygia Clark’s present retrospective on the Neue Nationalgalerie makes a compelling argument that artwork, remedy, and politics are way more intimately associated than they’re usually mentioned as being.
Clark was a pivotal member of the Neo-concretists, a bunch of Brazilian artists who coalesced within the Fifties round geometric abstraction in two and three dimensions. She usually labored within the hole between the 2, making each painterly sculptures and work with sculptural parts to them. However by the Nineteen Sixties — and following a army coup in 1964 that put in a brutal army dictatorship in Brazil — she and lots of of her friends more and more created artwork that invited contact not solely from guests, but in addition between them.
Within the later Nineteen Seventies, in pursuit of a strategy to work on the juncture of artwork and life, Clark started producing materials objects that would work as psychotherapeutic instruments by activating or deactivating the varied senses, particularly contact and sight. Her early forays on view on this exhibition embrace her Bichos (Creatures), vivid silver sculptures composed from items of aluminum joined by hinges so every object can take a spread of various kinds. Additionally on show are works from her collection Nostalgia of the Physique, begun the identical 12 months because the army coup. These items vary from the tiny “Diálogo de mãos (Dialogue of Hands),” a collaboration with fellow Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica consisting of a steady piece of fabric meant to affix two people’ arms collectively, to the massive “A casa é o corpo (The House Is The Body),” a three-phase construction that evokes the bodily technique of replica that’s meant to facilitate in guests a conceptual rebirth.
Set up view of a customer making an attempt on a sensory masks in Lygia Clark: Retrospective at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (photograph Cat Dawson/Hyperallergic)
Clark additionally produced works for teams, together with Life Buildings, a set of monumental rubber bands into which a number of individuals weave themselves, and Anthropophagic Slobber, through which an inert physique is steadily encased by colourful thread spun from the mouths of a number of individuals in a posh dance that additionally leaves the weavers tangled collectively.
The Neue Nationalgalerie’s presentation of Clark’s oeuvre diverges noticeably from a significant 2014 retrospective of her work on the Museum of Fashionable Artwork. Although the latter introduced Clark’s work into institutional dialog with extra recognizable names in the USA, like Rebecca Horn and Robert Morris, it offered restricted alternative to have interaction along with her sensorial objects. The Neue Nationalgalerie, in contrast, is replete with possibilities for guests to work together with the work. Whereas a few of the bichos are on plinths, a plethora of replicas are staged on a stepped construction onto which guests can climb or sit and transfer the creatures round, and replicas of Clark’s sensory fits — meant to dam out sight so individuals can deal with exploring their very own physique or that of one other particular person sporting a conjoined swimsuit — dangle from a wall throughout from plinths holding smaller wearable sensorial objects and a desk with replicas of these objects for guests to strive on. On the day I visited, youngsters had been enjoying with bichos on the platform; a pair was making an attempt on a set of mirrored glasses for 2; one other particular person posed for a photograph in a sensory hood; and a bunch of individuals had been getting steadily extra tangled in a community of interconnected rubber bands.
Lygia Clark, “Óculos” (1966) (© Cultural Affiliation “The World of Lygia Clark”; photograph Eduardo Clark, 1973)
For Clark, remedy was a type of survival: Turning inward to seek out and fortify the self throughout a army dictatorship was a radical act of self-preservation at a second when little or no recourse was out there to the person topic. Displaying others the best way to such an understanding, as Clark did for a lot of, is nothing if not a political act. To bundle that politics as artwork or remedy offers cowl to that act in a context through which its publicity as something however would put Clark and others like her in peril.
The Neue Nationalgalerie present explicates this strategic sleight of hand, a transfer that feels dangerous, as a lot of our already surveillance-saturated world slides ever extra within the course of authoritarianism. But Clark offers one thing like a roadmap for one strategy to survive and persevere even in troublesome occasions. Hers is laid naked right here, and her invitation to guests — whether or not they come for her inventive observe or therapeutic one — stays: decelerate, fortify the self by way of the connective tissues of collectivity, and study and create new pathways for survival and persistence.
Lygia Clark, “Superfície Modulada” (1955–56) (© Personal assortment)
Set up view of Lygia Clark: Retrospective at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (photograph Cat Dawson/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Lygia Clark, “Túnel” (1968) on the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz / David von Becker, 2025, © Neue)
Lygia Clark, “Cabeça Coletiva” (1969) (© Cultural Affiliation “The World of Lygia Clark”)
Lygia Clark, 1960 (© Eduardo Clark)
Set up view of “Casulo” (Cocoon) (1959) in Lygia Clark: Retrospective at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (photograph Cat Dawson/Hyperallergic)
Lygia Clark, “Estruturas de Caixa de Fósforos” (1964), gouache paint, matchboxes (© O Mundo de Lygia Clark-Associação Cultural, Rio de Janeiro; photograph Michael Brzezinski, Personal Assortment, London; Courtesy Alison Jacques)
Set up view of tourists interacting with objects in Lygia Clark: Retrospective at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (photograph Cat Dawson/Hyperallergic)
Lygia Clark: Retrospective continues on the Neue Nationalgalerie (Potsdamer Strasse 50, Berlin, Germany) by way of October 12. The exhibition was curated by by Irina Hiebert Grun and Maike Steinkamp, with Assistant Curator Sarah Hampel.
