"For Lygia Clark, Art Was a Means of Survival" by Cat Dawson

BERLIN — Lygia Clark’s current retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie makes a compelling argument that art, therapy, and politics are far more intimately related than they are often discussed as being.

Clark was a pivotal member of the Neo-concretists, a group of Brazilian artists who coalesced in the 1950s around geometric abstraction in two and three dimensions. She often worked in the gap between the two, making both painterly sculptures and paintings with sculptural elements to them. But by the 1960s — and following a military coup in 1964 that installed a brutal military dictatorship in Brazil — she and many of her peers increasingly created art that invited contact not only from visitors, but also between them.

In the later 1970s, in pursuit of a way to work at the juncture of art and life, Clark began producing material objects that could work as psychotherapeutic tools by activating or deactivating the various senses, especially touch and sight. Her early forays on view in this exhibition include her Bichos (Creatures), bright silver sculptures composed from pieces of aluminum joined by hinges so each object can take a range of different forms. Also on display are works from her series Nostalgia of the Body, begun the same year as the military coup. These pieces range from the tiny “Diálogo de mãos (Dialogue of Hands),” a collaboration with fellow Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica consisting of a continuous piece of material meant to join two individuals’ hands together, to the large “A casa é o corpo (The House Is The Body),” a three-phase structure that evokes the physical process of reproduction that is meant to facilitate in visitors a conceptual rebirth.

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