Lygia Clark’s Architecture of Feeling

There is an all-encompassing satisfaction when an exhibition demonstrates alignment between the artworks on display and the architecture that frames them. Such is the case with Lygia Clark’s retrospective at Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie. Established within the late-1950s Brazilian neo-concrete movement, which prioritized embodied and sensory experience, Clark’s practice was concerned with the subjective relationship between artwork and space, artist and viewer. Here, the synergy with the museum building, designed by Mies van der Rohe and defined by its flexible interior space, makes for a presentation that encourages movement, exploration and playful release.

A concurrent aural experience resonates throughout this show. There is the gentle tap, tap, tap of Clark’s 1960s ‘Bichos’ (Critters) series, comprising sculptures with hinged aluminium plates that viewers are invited to fold and reshape; the laughter of people experimenting with the masks, bodysuits, glasses and rubber tubing of the ‘Objetos sensoriais’ (Sensorial Objects, 1966–67), which can be handled and worn to engage unique bodily perceptions; and the gentle puff and rat-a-tat-tat of her ‘Objetos relacionais’ (Relational Objects, late 1970s–1980s), made of stones, shells, tights and other items, which Clark incorporated into psychotherapeutic sessions.

What is perhaps most intuitive about this exhibition is how it spatially mirrors the radical development of Clark’s oeuvre – small areas are delineated with curtains and then expand into open-plan fluidity. It begins with paintings from the 1950s: after initially rendering figurative scenes, Clark developed a cubist style upon moving to Paris, where she studied with Fernand Léger. Paintings such as Escada (Staircase, 1951), where the spiralling form is divided into facets of primary colour, demonstrate her early interest in visualizing constructions of space via this architectural motif.

Quickly moving towards the dissolution of the boundary between image and surrounding space, the show coherently traces the development of Clark’s concept of the linha orgânica (organic line), which she defined as the gap between the picture and the frame, enlivening a static painting to approach three-dimensionality. This initially manifests in paintings where the frame is inherent to the pictorial structure, and progresses through ‘Estruturas de caixa de fósforos’ (Matchbox Structures, 1964) – tiny painted boxes glued together in expansive geometric formations.

With the development of her silver-tongued ‘Bichos’ – poised like packs of animals across tiered plinths – Clark’s experiential work fully unfurls. And so too does the show, which pulls you fluidly from one experiential zone to the next: from Caminhando (Walking, 1963), where visitors can cut a paper Möbius strip and play with this infinite loop, to the ‘Máscaras sensoriais’ (Sensorial Masks, 1967), which smell of cardamom and have ear covers and eyepieces with moveable mirrors, to the compelling video documentation of performances such as Baba antropofágica (Anthropophagic Slobber) and Canibalismo (Cannibalism, both 1969). In the former, participants pull spools of saliva-soaked thread from their mouths to weave a web that entangles a reclining figure. In the latter, a person lies on the floor in a suit with a stomach pocket filled with fruit, while a blindfolded group kneels and eats from it – a lascivious act of symbolic consumption. For Clark, the idea of mutual cannibalization suggested bodies fusing into a collective entity, be it through web-like cocooning or the suggestion of outright eating one another – she saw these as rebellious acts of sensorial communality, which was anathema to the iron-fist rule of the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–85).

All these years on, Clark’s art is still sensuously compelling, absorbing and radical in its proposition of how we might engage not only with our own bodies as a way of accessing selfhood, but in relational experiences that can constitute a collective physicality in which everyone is equal, enlivened and empowered.

Lygia Clark’s retrospective is on view at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, until 12 October

_{Main image: Lygia Clark, Composição (Composition) 1952, oil on canvas, 54 × 65 cm. Courtesy: © Coleção Jones Bergamin}