Unity No. 1 (Unidade No. 1)

Lygia ClarkWW-1958-131872

1958·Industrial paint on wood·30 × 30 cm (11 13/16 × 11 13/16 in.)

<p>Lygia Clark was a founding member of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement, which pioneered modes of geometric abstract art that upset the usual relationship between artwork and observer and challenged traditional dualities between surface and edge or composition and support. These paintings, from a series of seven, demonstrate Clark's move away from abstraction that relied on a stable relationship between figure and ground (seen in the work of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, on view upstairs). She later wrote that her works were neither . .. a 'machine' nor an 'object' but rather an almost-body, which is to say, a being whose reality is not exhausted in the ... relationships between its elements.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1958
Medium: Industrial paint on wood
Dimensions: 30 × 30 cm (11 13/16 × 11 13/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Lygia Clark

Artist

Lygia Clark

Painting

Lygia Clark pioneered interactive sculpture and installation that collapsed the boundary between artwork and viewer, transforming painting into a participatory experience. A founding member of Brazil's Neo-Concrete movement alongside Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar, she moved beyond geometric abstraction to create tactile objects, mobiles, and environments that viewers could manipulate and inhabit. Her practice, which intensified from 1960 onward, investigated the relationship between interior and exterior space, self and world, through materials ranging from metal and wood to rubber and fabric. Her radical insistence that art required physical and sensory engagement fundamentally reshaped sculpture and installation in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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