Clark, Lygia (1920–1988)

Lygia Clark (b. 1920; d. 1988), Brazilian painter and sculptor. Clark began her artistic training in the late 1940s at the School of Fine Arts in Belo Hori-zonte, where she was born. Her first teachers were the painter Alberto da Veiga Guignard and the landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx. Upon graduating, she traveled to Europe and studied in Paris for two years with Ferdinand Léger. In 1952 she returned to Rio de Janeiro, where she began to experiment with the geometric abstract language common to constructivist and concrete art. In 1954, with the concrete movement in full swing, Clark joined Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica, Decio Vieira, and other concrete artists as members of Grupo Frente. Eschewing representation, these artists opposed the imitation of nature as well as lyrical nonfigurative art.

By 1959, with the fragmentation of the concrete movement, Clark, Ferreira Gullar, Lygia Pape, Hélio Oiticica, and others formed the neoconcrete group. In their manifesto they declared that the neoconcrete movement had "emerged out of the need to express the complex realities of modern man with a new plastic language." They rejected the scientific and positivist attitudes permeating the concrete movement and called for the incorporation of "new verbal dimensions" in art. Through painting and sculpture, Clark sought to create "real," kinetic space. Toward this end, she extended her canvases beyond the confines of the frame, searching for an organic dimension within geometry so that the spectator could enter the painting and participate, such as in Animals, a sculpture formed of metal surfaces, which the spectator can manipulate.

In the 1960s Clark experimented with other tactile artistic projects such as short films and body art. By the 1970s her interests ventured away from art into the psychological implications of spectator participation and in 1976 led her to declare herself a "nonartist."

See alsoArt: The Twentieth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lygia Clark, "O homem como suporte vivo de una arqui-tetura biológica imanente," in Arte Brasileira Hoje, edited by Ferreira Gullar (1973), pp. 159-160.

Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America (1989), esp. pp. 264-265.

Additional Bibliography

Cabo, Paula Terra. "Resignifying Modernity: Clark, Oiticica and Categories of the Modern in Brazil." Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 1997.

Carneiro, Beatriz Scigliano. Relâmpagos com claror Lygia Clark e Hélio Oiticica, vida com arte. São Paulo: Imaginário, 2004.

Milliet, Maria Alice. Lygia Clark: Obra-trajeto. São Paulo: Edusp, 1992.

                                  Caren A. Meghreblian