24 Facts About Lygia Clark

Lygia Pimentel Lins, better known as Lygia Clark, was a Brazilian artist best known for her painting and installation work.

Lygia Clark was often associated with the Brazilian Constructivist movements of the mid-20th century and the Tropicalia movement.

From 1960 on, Clark discovered ways for viewers to interact with her art works.

Lygia Clark's work dealt with the relationship between inside and outside, and, ultimately, between self and world.

In 1957, Lygia Clark participated in Rio de Janeiro's first National Concrete Art Exhibition.

Lygia Clark soon became a prime figure among the Neo-concretists, whose 1959 manifesto called for abstract art to be more subjective and less rational and idealist.

Lygia Clark's art became a multi-sensory experience in which the spectator became an active participant.

Between 1979 and 1988, Lygia Clark moved toward art therapy, using her objects in interactive sessions with patients.

In 1977, Lygia Clark returned to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and she died of a heart attack in her home in 1988.

Lygia Clark drew on the writings of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose phenomenology resonated with the intertwining of subject and object she sought in her breakthrough work of the 1960s.

In 1964, Lygia Clark began her Nostalgia of the Body series with the intention of abandoning the production of art objects in order to create art that was rooted in the senses.

Also in 1966, Lygia Clark created Pedra e ar [Stone and Air], a pebble perched upon a small plastic bag filled with air.

Lygia Clark is one of the most established artists associated with the Tropicalia movement.

Lygia Clark explored the role of sensory perception and psychic interaction that participants would have with her artwork.

Lygia Clark later moved on to co-found the Neo-Concrete movement, which fellow Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica then joined.

Lygia Clark described the exchange between viewer and Bicho as a dialogue between two living organisms.

Lygia Clark spent these years in Paris where she taught at the Sorbonne, UFR d'Arts Plastiques et Sciences de l'Art de l'Universite de Paris 1, a newly founded school remarkable for its open, experimental model in contrast to the more traditional beaux-arts academy format.

Lygia Clark did not separate the mind from the body and believed that art should be experienced through all five senses.

Lygia Clark believed that a viewer, or "participant", served an active and important function in the art world.

Lygia Clark's belief was that art should be a multi-sensory experience, not just one enjoyed through the eyes.

Lygia Clark viewed it as the vomiting of a lived experience that, in turn, was swallowed by others.

Lygia Clark's work was included in the 2021 exhibition Women in Abstraction at the Centre Pompidou.

Lygia Clark's work is held in collections worldwide including MoMA, Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts ; the Menil Collection ; Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Walker Art Center, and Centre Pompidou.

At Sotheby's in 2014, Lygia Clark's aluminium folding sculpture Bicho-Em-Si-Md was sold at $1.2 million, doubling its high estimate of $600,000.