Background
Clark was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, on October 23, 1920, to an upper-class family.
2014
New York City, New York, United States
Lygia Clark's largest retrospective in New York, in 2014.
Paris, France
In 1972 Lygia Clark taught a course on gestural communication at the Sorbonne University.
Lygia Clark.
Lygia Clark.
Lygia Clark in her later years.
Portrait of Lygia Clark.
Lygia Clark.
Lygia Clark surrounded by her works.
Portrait of Lygia Clark.
Clark was born in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil, on October 23, 1920, to an upper-class family.
Initially, Lygia Clark was educated by nuns at the Sacré Cœur Catholic School. She displayed a strong interest in drawing from an early age. In 1947, she moved to Rio de Janeiro.
From 1947 to 1949 Clarke studied under the direction of the painter and landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, who was an important figure in Latin American Modernism. In addition, she also studied under the painter and sculptor Zélia Salgado.
Her fascination with the European avant-garde led her to Paris, where she lived between 1950 and 1951 and trained under the tutelage of the abstract painters Árpad Szenes, Isaac Dobrinsky, and Fernand Léger.
Clark's left Paris for Brazil and gave her first solo exhibition. With professional success came personal difficulties as her marriage broke down. This ultimately allowed her to pursue a chosen career and she devoted her time to painting and sculpture.
The period of the 1950s in Brazil was characterized by an intense optimism, derived from the economic prosperity and political stability. Rio de Janeiro was an exciting place to be: the strains of Bossa Nova were in the air. The Concrete and Neo-concrete movements emerged at this time and quickly became extremely popular. Clark's early abstract compositions were vivid examples of visual art produced back then.
In the year 1954, Lygia Clark joined the Grupo Frente, an artists' group led by Ivan Serpa. It also included Lygia Pape and Helio Oiticica; Oiticica soon became Clark's life-long friend. The group initially accepted the ideals of Concrete art (which emphasized geometrical abstraction). However, by 1959, Clark and Oiticica had joined their names to the signatories on the Manifesto Neo-concreta, who criticized the overly dogmatic approach of some Concrete artists, and appealed for a Concrete art with greater sensuality, colour and feeling.
The Neo-concretists were greatly influenced by the phenomenology of French thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who had pioneered a subjective, embodied approach to philosophical investigation. Around this time, Lygia Clark was starting to adopt a similar approach to her work, so she started to break away from the Concrete group and the orthodox Modernist canon. Her paintings developed from two-dimensional abstractions to three-dimensional ones, for instance, her Breaking the frame (Quebra da mouldura, 1954), and participatory objects such as the Critters (Bichos, 1960-1963).
By the mid 1960s, Clark's work was fully corporeal, participatory, and performative. Her artworks had no trace of her earlier geometric abstraction. She was now an internationally renowned artist, with a succession of critically acclaimed exhibitions, including a major solo show in London in 1965, and the opportunity to represent Brazil at the Venice Biennale in 1968, where Clark displayed a participatory installation simulating the experience of gestation and birth entitled The House is the Body: Penetration, Ovulation, Germination, Expulsion (A Casa é o Corpo: Penetração, Ovulação, Germinação e Expulsão, 1968). This work exemplifies her desire to arrive at a spatial and psychological understanding of the body, and to facilitate this process of exploration for her participants.
In 1964 a coup in Brazil took place and established a repressive military regime that would last until 1984. Clark, like many other artists, writers, and intellectuals, went to Europe, arriving in Paris in 1968. Clark's highly embodied, participatory artworks of this period are often understood as a response to the tense political situation in Brazil, as well as to the recent unrest in Paris.
Lygia Clark's work during this period was echoed in the development of broader creative movements, including the Brazilian Tropicália movement. It was an optimistic anti-authoritarian project that brought together visual artists like Clark and Oiticica, with musicians such as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, and filmmakers such as Neville de Almeida.
In 1972 Clark was offered a teaching position. She taught a course on gestural communication at the Sorbonne, enabling her to shift from individual practice to collaborative group activities. She became critical of art institutions, especially museums, and started to think of her work in terms of a refusal of traditional art-making. Her writing during this period of time suggests that she experienced a series of psychological and sexual crises. Around this time she underwent psychoanalysis with Pierre Fédida (a former student of Gilles Deleuze), ending treatment in 1974 in favor of a new alternative therapeutic regime.
Lygia Clark moved back to Rio de Janeiro in 1976, where she started a practice as a therapist and healer, treating individual patients at her home. These sessions consisted of the application of self-designed props or relational objects to her patients' bodies. Clark called her therapeutic method Estruturação do Self (Structuring of the Self), and by the early 1980s was training psychologists, artists, and therapists in its application.
Brazil in 1976 was a very different place than it used to be. A new government-sponsored cultural programme prioritizing entertainment for the masses has replaced the atmosphere of experimentation and dialogue that had shaped the art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. The final years were particularly difficult for the artist: she had financial and emotional difficulties.
Quotations:
"We do everything so automatically that we have forgotten the poignancy of smell, of physical anguish, of tactile sensations of all kinds."
"What's important is the act of doing in the present; the artist is dissolved into the world."
"I discovered that the body is the house...and that the more we become aware of it the more we rediscover the body as an unfolding totality."
Physical Characteristics: During Clark's later years, her health was deteriorating, aggravated by heavy drinking.
At the age of eighteen, Lygia Clark married Aluízio Clark Ribeiro, a civil engineer. By the age of twenty-five, Clark was a mother of three children: Elizabeth (1941), Álvaro (1943), and Eduardo (1945). The marriage ended in divorce in 1953.