Lygia Clark

The curatorial and editorial project for systems, non-objective and reductive artists working in the UK

Lygia Clark: Work from the 1950s

Alison Jacques Gallery, 3 June – 30 July 2016

Review by Neil Zakiewicz

“It [the art object] is like an egg: we can only see its substance when we open it.” Lygia Clark, 1965 – About The Magic Of The Object

Installation shot. Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Copyright O Mundo de Lygia Clark-Associação Cultural, Rio de Janeiro. Photo Michael Brzezinski

Lygia Clark had an ambivalent relationship with the object. Her paintings in this exhibition do nothing to conceal their objecthood, incorporating folded papers or laminated panels fixed to back supports, industrial paint products on plywood or card. The works are functional and demonstrative. Strangely, for an artist who commented in her notes about Piet Mondrian that she was impressed by how he “cleaned the canvas of representative space”, many of these paintings appear to be representations of imagined interiors and stairs, or plans of three-dimensional works. Planos em superficie modulada (1957), for example, with its skewed black and white rectangles, is a visual conundrum of figure and ground, pre-empting Op Art by some ten years.

Most of these works are simple arrangements of shapes with a forceful visual presence, yet their small scale makes them resemble sketches. Two works here are actual preparatory studies for Clark’s now-celebrated ‘Bichos’, the interactive hinged sculptures that she produced in the early 1960s, one example of which is on display here in a vitrine. The exhibition throughout has an uneasy sense of contingency; are these stand-alone works, or workings-out? In the light of Clark's later conception of the artwork not as the final goal, but as a means to engage the audience, these early works reveal her inching towards this idea.

Donald Judd's definition of his own work as “spare” might equally be applicable to Clark's. The paintings have a self-assuredness, in that they are unembellished by virtuoso paint handling, and their proportions are only as large as they need to be. Clark’s collage work Superficie Modulada (1958) is made up of two squares in diamond format, each with a white and black half, one square overlapping the other and rotated by 45º. As an rudimentary exercise in optical illusion, it is like being taught to read ABC. Clark is concerned to heighten a viewer's consciousness of his or her ocular reactions to shape and form; an almost clinical approach that was extended in later corporeal performance works in the 1970s, in which participants were blindfolded with a hood and encouraged to experience their bodily responses to being touched with various objects, as a form of therapy.

One such experiment to activate the viewer can be seen in the upstairs gallery, with Planos em Superficie Modulada (1957), a two-sided framed collage displayed on a plinth. The geometric arrangements on both sides are similar, and coloured black and white. Clark, dramatically, attempts to depart from the usual artistic convention of the privileged, singular viewpoint; instead, we are obliged to walk around the picture that has two fronts.

Other paintings and models in the exhibition overtly relate to architecture. Perhaps caught up by the energy of the utopian transformation of 1950s Brazil, Clark created these works before her exile to Paris in 1968. Her small drawing Sem titulo (1952) owes much to Constructivist articulations of planes and space. The three plywood architectural models, Construa você Mesmo seu Espaço para Viver (1955) and the dolls-house-like Maquete para Interior no 1. (1955) and Maquete para Interior no 2. (1955) were building designs that were never to be realised, despite their meticulous detail. They imagine a synthesis of the arts, in common with the most radically holistic architectural Modernism. Rather than using an interventionist approach, they are fabricated from the ground up, as if Blinky Palermo had designed a whole building for his famous wall paintings. Art here is not subservient, an after-effect or decoration, but an equal partner in a new architecture.

Clark's 1950s paintings are clearly indebted to earlier European painting, yet the openness of her approach feels contemporary. We are now familiar with the expanded notions of painting and seriality that she helped to pioneer, to the extent that Raphael Rubinstein defines current painting in his essay Provisional Painting as a “finished product disguised as preliminary”. In recent years, provisionality has become almost a default mode for artists; we expect to be addressed directly by the artwork, even if our role is merely to applaud or nod sagely (safely) from afar. However, with Lygia Clark, one feels that the barriers are completely down and we are complicit in the action. Her agnosticism about the medium of painting (after all, soon after this, she abandoned it), increases the sense that we should not over-value the object and, unlike Rubinstein’s view, there is no 'disguise'. This makes her theatre real, pragmatic and hopeful.

Installation shot. Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Copyright O Mundo de Lygia Clark-Associação Cultural, Rio de Janeiro. Photo Michael Brzezinski

Planos em superfície modulada, 1957. Collage, cardboard. 14.4 x 54cm. Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Copyright O Mundo de Lygia Clark-Associação Cultural, Rio de Janeiro. Photo Michael Brzezinski

Superficio Modulada, 1958. Collage of card. 42.5 x 63cm.Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Copyright O Mundo de Lygia Clark-Associação Cultural, Rio de Janeiro. Photo Michael Brzezinski

Maquete para Interior no 1. (1955). Wood, oil paint. 50 x 30.5 x18cm. Courtesy Alison Jacques Gallery, London. Copyright O Mundo de Lygia Clark-Associação Cultural, Rio de Janeiro. Photo Michael Brzezinski