Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988

Description

Published in conjunction with a major monographic retrospective of the work of Brazilian painter, sculptor and performance artist Lygia Clark, this publication presents a linear and progressive survey of the artist's groundbreaking practice. Having trained with modern masters from the late 1940s to mid-1950s, Clark was at the forefront of Constructivist and Neo-Concretist movements in Brazil and fostered the active participation of the spectator through her works. Examining Clark's output from her early abstract compositions to the 'biological architectures' and 'relational objects' she created late in her career, this is the most comprehensive volume on the artist available in English. Three sections based on key phases throughout her career - Abstraction, Neo-Concretism and The Abandonment of Art - examine these critical moments in Clark's production, anchor significant concepts or constellations of works that mark a definitive step in her work, and shed light on groundbreaking sets of circumstances in her life as an artist. Each section is accompanied by a selection of works by other artists that provide context for understanding the circumstances that shaped her artistic investigations, as well works by a younger generation of Brazilian artists that reflect Clark's own landmark influence. Featuring a significant selection of previously unpublished archival texts of Clark's personal writings, it is a vital source of primary documentation for twentieth-century art history scholarship.

Cornelia Butler is Chief Curator at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Luis Perez-Oramas is the Estrellita Brodsky Curator of Latin American Art for the Department of Drawings and Prints at The Museum of Modern Art. Sergio Bessa is the director of curatorial and education programs at the Bronx Museum, and a teacher of Museum Education at Columbia University. Eleonora Fabiao is a performer/performance theorist and Associate Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Briony Fer is a British art historian, curator and Professor of History of Art at University College London. Geaninne Gutierrez-Guimaraes has curated for the Museum of Modern Art and the Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery. Andre Lepecki is Associate Professor at the Department of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. He is a writer and curator working mainly on performance studies, choreography and dramaturgy. Zeuler Lima is an architect and associate professor of history, theory and design at the School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis.

...a big, openhearted retrospective of the great Brazilian artist who made the arduous look effortless.-- "The New Yorker" As Lygia Clark's current MoMA retrospective finally brings her career more fully into view, so, too, arrive overdue scholarship, insights, and revelations about her work. Devotees of the Brazilian artist already know that previous monographs were scant and expansive, and that much of the key criticism about her, as well as her own prose, hadn't been translated from Portuguese. Offering a strong corrective, this catalogue strives to be definitive, with essays by ten authors alongside nearly three hundred spaciously arranged images of Clark's boundary-breaking art.--Lauren O'Neill-Butler "Bookforum" During the 1960s and 70s, the Brazilian art scene was a hotbed of radical innovation, thanks to the Neo- Concretist movement, of which Lygia Clark(1920-1988) was a leading figure. This retrospective represents the first for the artist in North America, and surveys everything from her efforts in painting and sculpture to her move into Conceptualism.--Howard Halle "Time Out New York" Now regarded as one of the postwar era's most important artists, Lygia Clark produced a generative body of abstract painting in the 1950s, reinvented sculpture with her participatory objects of the '60s, and later devised an altogether unique mode of ritualistic, collective quasi therapy.--Daniel Quiles "Artforum"