by Fionn Adamian // June 27, 2025
Art history likes clairvoyants. Divine as a tea leaf, the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark heralded not one, but three casualties of the field: the death of painting, the death of the author, the death of the autonomous art object. If everything Clark happened to be around seemed to die shortly after, she also guaranteed that the lessons of each experiment found atavistic form in later work, fruit begetting fabric and fabric begetting flesh.
Lygia Clark in her Atelier, Rio de Janeiro, 1950s // © Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark
Here are the career highlights, flashing by at warp speed in the necessarily dense retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie. By the mid-1950s, Clark’s fastidious studies of cubism—the early works of an artist yet to find her voice—culminated in the startling visual assault of her ensemble of ‘Units’: thick planks of wood varnished with black ink and terse white dash marks. Nothing she created after these devotional panels was designed to be seen and not held. Under the aegis of her membership in Rio de Janeiro’s neo-concrete movement, which asserted that the concrete artwork, unlike its universalist forebears, should engage all the bodily senses, her precious shapes were resurrected as the hardy, manipulable, aluminum plates of her most famous sculptures, the ‘Bichos.’ And, when still impatient with the chasm between the viewer and the artwork, Clark reduced the scope of her artistic act to the provision of guidelines of how the participant (now artist) should handle a given material. She saw her late collective enactments of the early 1970s “as a type of social electric shock, at the limits of psychodrama”—something that approximated the therapeutic techniques of François Tosquelles.
‘Lygia Clark. Retrospektive,’ 2025, installation view at Neue Nationalgalerie // © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, photo by David von Becker
You can experience these works chronologically, with one artistic period leading seamlessly to the next, or you can dive sideways into the wreck. For my second visit, I started with the mid-career ‘Bichos’—not just the most photogenic of Clark’s works but also those that link her commitment to abstraction with her later sensory experiments. To respect Clark’s value of interactivity, the mid-career ‘Bichos’ on display include both originals (non-touchable) and replicas (that the visitor is encouraged to handle). Visually, the ‘Bichos’ are impressive though slightly conventional abstract sculptures, with an economy of contradictory lines emerging from geometric metal sheets joined at the hinge.
Lygia Clark: ‘Bicho De Bolso,’ 1966 // © Private Collection
Touch, however, was always Clark’s point, and the exhibition copies, deposed on red carpeted elevations for comfortable access, vociferously demand the visitor’s tactile engagement. Though ‘Bichos’ is sometimes translated as “beasts,” the time one spends with these works shows that the exhibition notes follow an apter evocation: these “critters” are smart, ornery, loud and truculent. Because each movement along one hinge triggers a reaction in the others, the surfaces of the sculpture come into view and disappear in an unanticipated fashion. No matter how you set it down, the critter recuperates its low center of balance, like a cockroach ready to make an escape in the crushed margin of a wall. Grappling with the shape of these critters is an invigorating object lesson in the close reading of sculpture. The original ‘Bichos,’ distanced from the viewer’s hands by a large white plinth, become nonentities in comparison to the tangible replicas.
‘Lygia Clark. Retrospektive,’ 2025, installation view at Neue Nationalgalerie // © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, photo by David von Becker
The compact circuitry of hand, eyeball and sculpture foreshadows the similarly trained focus of Clark’s later ‘Sensorial Objects’ (1966-1967), arrayed for the visitor to test like at a science fair. “We refuse the artist who pretends by means of the object to give a total communication of his or her message, without the spectator’s participation,” wrote Clark in the same year she was working on these targeted appeals to perception and metaphor making. There are tiny conch shells that softly chatter as they pass through a bound plastic bag filled with water; a mask that deprives you of sight but imparts a whiff of camomile in return; a pair of hefty PVC suits connected by a black umbilical cord so that partners can probe the innards of the other suit’s filling (‘The I and the You’).
Lygia Clark: ‘Estruturas Vivas,’ 1966 // © Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark
An artist for whom writing seemed an integral part of her creative process, Clark was at pains to differentiate her later social experiments from parallel art movements of the day. In an article published in ‘October’ shortly after her death, the scholar Yves-Alain Bois, on intimate terms with Clark from their shared time in Paris, recalled a vituperative meeting from 1973 between the artist and a curator who wanted to prepare a retrospective. Clark summarily rejected the idea of an exhibition on the grounds that her practice had distanced itself from decorative object-making for the last five years. She was amenable to only one solution: the museum would fund a three-month continuation—the ensuing scare quotes are from Bois—of the “courses” that she had been “giving” in a ramshackle warehouse at the University of Paris. A prime example of these courses was ‘Baba antropofágica’—then called ‘the Drool,’ for short—in which the participants would gather in a circle and unspool a thread they had placed in their mouths, draping the wet entrails over another semi-nude participant on the floor.
Recovering from his momentary surprise, the curator made the mistake of suggesting a resemblance to “Happenings” or “body art.” Clark flew into a rage: her oeuvre had “nothing to do with any performance whatsoever nor with the offering on a platter, for the secondary benefit of a voyeur, of her fantasies and her impulses.” (Half the interest of a recording like Valie Export’s ‘Tastkino’ obtains from watching the Old World faces of prim Viennese businessmen crack into incredulity when offered to feel the artist’s breasts en route to work; Clark’s point was that her art was not concerned with shocking the bourgeoisie). No one was allowed to “spectate” her courses; anyone that refused to participate in these rites was dismissed. So too was the curator that evening. Clark threw a party that night to celebrate her “irreversible divorce” from the art world.
Lygia Clark: ‘O Eu e o Tu (Série Roupa-Corpo-Roupa),’ 1967 // © Cultural Association “The World of Lygia Clark” (Ref. 20428)
The exhibition’s display of filmic recreations of not just ‘Baba antropofágica,’ but also another absorbing and slightly gross experiment ‘Cannibalism,’ goes to show that the role of spectatorship was not quite as abolished in Clark’s art as she might have liked. It’s deadly funny, and just a little pathetic, to watch the blindfolded participants of ‘Cannibalism’ munch placidly on half-rotten fruit extracted from a sprawled man’s PVC suit—the “victim” of these “cannibals.” Her masks call similarly for a spectator’s attention: while the participant’s vision of the external world may be blocked, she appears as a hooded aberration, borderline menacing, to those outside of her (Clark’s work originates in an entirely different cultural context, but it is impossible for me to look at her masks and not think of the imagery of the KKK).
The real reason behind this visceral opposition to the artist’s being “domesticated” in the museum, as Clark once remarked, may have laid in her sense of helplessness—and guilt—as an exile from the Brazilian dictatorship. Clark left Brazil in 1968, the same year that the dictatorship brutally repressed student protests and indefinitely legalized, under Institutional Act 5, the suspension of habeas corpus for political crimes. Though art world status and economic class enabled Clark to impose a physical distance between herself and her country, she never stopped circling the thought that art was a somehow inadequate response to the political emergency. Comparing her own artistic practice of crafting the future unfavorably to that of political activists, Clark wrote: “When there is a struggle with the police and I see, in Brazil, a seventeen-year-old killed (I put his photo on my wall, in my studio), I realize that he dug a place with his body for the generations that will succeed him.” As the scholar Ana María Léon has observed, the introspective mood of Clark’s sensorial works “seems appropriate for a population with no agency in the election of their own president.”
Lygia Clark: ‘Túnel,’ 1968, installation view at Neue Nationalgalerie, 2025 // © Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, photo by David von Becker
With its considerable offering of tactile replicas of Clark’s work, the exhibition tends to accentuate the artist’s allergy to institutional capture and foregrounds the ways that Clark proved prescient—about the collapse of the traditional artist role, the simultaneous demand for and unclarity of the artist’s place in the political landscape. Art, however, is never made for how it might look in the future. With every individual work here, you get the sense of the pleasure that Clark had in returning to the scuzzy, intractable immediacy of making. Her gift of her participatory works was to allow us to share in that moment.
Exhibition Info
Neue Nationalgalerie
Lygia Clark: ‘Retrospective’
Exhibition: May 23-Oct. 12, 2025
smb.museum
Potsdamer Str. 50, 10785 Berlin, click here for map
