Lygia Clark
Lygia Clark’s Eu e o Tu (The I and the You) (1967), which lends the exhibition its title. Photo: Vicente de Mello Sem data. Courtesy Associacão Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark
A major exhibition dedicated to Lygia Clark (1920-88), the Brazilian artist who in the 1960s dramatically recalibrated the relationship between artist and audience, is now open at Whitechapel Gallery. Clark had a solo show at Signals gallery in London in 1965, and has been included in various group shows, but this is the first time she has been given a significant solo show by a UK institution.
The exhibition builds on the Whitechapel Gallery’s history of championing artists from all over the world and Latin America in particular, from Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti to Hélio Oiticica, Tunga and Alfredo Jaar. From its beginnings in 1901, “the gallery has been locally embedded but globally connected”, says the director Gilane Tawadros.
The exhibition spans the mid 1950s to the early 1970s—some of the most repressive years of Brazil’s military dictatorship—when Clark spent time in Paris, returning to Rio de Janeiro permanently in 1976. The period coincides with her move away from geometric abstraction towards a greater focus on sensory experience and on closing the gap between work and audience. By the end of her life, Tawadros says, “she saw it as a form of therapy, a form of healing”.
Read full article at theartnewspaper.com