"Sensorial Aesthetics: A New Exhibition Encompasses Lygia Clark’s Four-Decade Career" by Cynthia Garcia

Gallerist Max Perlingeiro, founder of Pinakotheke gallery, is the curator of “Lygia Clark (1920-1988) Centennial” currently showing in Rio de Janeiro. The retrospective displays 100 artworks from Clark’s four-decade career, featuring all of the radical artist’s seventeen official series in chronological order. The show also presents the thirty-minute documentary film, “Memória do Corpo” (Memory of the Body, 1984), directed by Mario Carneiro and filmed by conceptual artist Waltércio Caldas. The film focuses on Clark’s sessions of “Structuring the Self,” the art-therapy method she created and to which she dedicated the last third of her life after turning her back to the art market. In mid-November the exhibition moves on to Pinakotheke São Paulo, followed by MultiArte Pinakotheke in Fortaleza in early 2022. In the 300-page book published by the gallery for the exhibition, Perlingeiro’s introduction comes in the form of a postmortem letter to Clark, where he discloses that he had the chance to meet her twice but on both occasions was too shy to approach the legendary artist.

Clark’s last São Paulo solo exhibition in her lifetime, “Lygia Clark: The Decade of 1950,” with curatorial text by Paulo Sérgio Duarte, happened in 1982 at Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud (later renamed Galeria Raquel Arnaud). The gallerist recalls: “Lygia was charismatic, intelligent, talkative and had a strong, complex personality. For the exhibition she decided to only show works from two series, the mid-1950s series Superfície Modulada (Modulated Surface), an experiment with the idea of the spiral around a central axis to obtain a sensation of movement within the painting, and Casulos (Cocoons) of the late-1950s, structures in sheet metal that indicate that by then she had firm intention to go beyond the ‘surface’ of geometric abstraction. During the exhibition period, she gave a lecture at PUC university on ‘Structuring the Self,’ her art-therapeutical method. Her thoughts were articulated in an interesting manner, students were fascinated. She inspired a pop-cultural following, her name is a reference in the Tropicalia movement of 1970s. Lygia’s boundary-pushing art broke barriers and helped to cement contemporary art. She was extraordinary as an artist and as a woman.”

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