In 1965, Brazilian artist Lygia Clark addressed her audience directly in an exhibition text, “It’s you who now give expression to my thoughts, to draw from them whatever vital experience you want”. Even then, it was clear she didn’t just want people to look at her work, she saw them as participants, even co-authors, whose involvement made her sculptures and performances possible in the first place. Now, the Neue Nationalgalerie presents a comprehensive retrospective that revisits Clark’s radical, participatory practice and her role as a leading figure of the Neoconcretismo movement, which emerged in late-1950s Rio de Janeiro. The neo-concretists aimed to create art that could be experienced through the senses — things that exist not just as objects, but in the space between artwork and viewer, between artist and audience. Before Clark turned to interactive formats, her work was rooted in geometric abstraction. Even her early paintings from the 1950s show a clear preoccupation with the relationship between object and space. But she soon began breaking free from the canvas. In 1959, she created her first geometric sculptures, which she called Bichos (animals). At first glance, they resemble oversized origami made of aluminum. What makes them unique? They’re foldable, movable, and designed to be manipulated, changing shape with the viewer’s touch.
While the viewer becomes the creator of the Bichos, Clark’s Objetos Sensoriais (Sensory Objects) expand the experience to the body. These wearable pieces — jackets, masks, glasses — are to be used alone or together, encouraging a heightened awareness of self, surroundings, and others. The idea of shared experience took center stage in her later work. From the late 1960s until her death in 1988, Clark developed the concept of the Corpo Coletivo (Collective Body), shifting focus to group performances and embodied interaction. With around 120 original works and 50 reconstructions, curators Irina Hiebert Grun and Maike Steinkamp offer a rare opportunity to experience Clark’s visionary thinking — art that invites all the senses. But it’s not just the objects that form her legacy. A wide-ranging performance program activates Clark’s ideas today, including her 1970 piece Collective Body, in which participants wear colorful overalls connected by threads. One person moves, and the others must follow, forming a single, interdependent body in motion. Just as Lygia Clark envisioned.
Text: Laura Storfner / Credit: Cultural Association “The World of Lygia Clark”; Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark; Neue Nationalgalerie – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, David von Becker
Neue Nationalgalerie, Potsdamer Str.50, 10785 Berlin-Tiergarten; map
Lygia Clark. Retrospektive until 12.10.2025
@neuenationalgalerie
