Lygia Clark: Organic Planes
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
24 September 2014 – 4 January 2015
Lygia Clark radically innovated the relationship between the art object and the audience. The focus of this solo exhibition is a sculpture from 1960, ‘Bicho Pássaro do Espaço’ (‘Creature Passing through Space’), contextualised by a series of collages made in 1957. Concurrently, a single architectural scale sculpture by Clark, ‘Fantastic Architecture I’, is on display until the end of October at Henry Moore’s former home and studio in rural Hertfordshire.
Clark’s ground-breaking work has become a reference point for artists pushing the limits of sculpture today. Her approach was built on a singular experience that delivered authorship to the spectator and sought to break the space between the artwork and perception. This focused exhibition gives a snapshot of the moment when her practice moved from the wall to the hand.
The three square collages, ‘Planos em superfície modulada’ (‘Planes in modulated surface’, 1957) push at the limits of the frame, twisting the plane into three-dimensional space using an active geometry. Clark had a constant practice of writing alongside making work, which included highly productive correspondences with the artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-80). Three years after making these works, in a text titled ‘The Death of the Plane’, she noted that the plane was an invented concept, driven by a human desire for balance, which she sought to undo through intuitive, ‘organic’ thinking, announcing that ‘demolishing the plane as a support of expression is to gain awareness of unity as a living and organic whole.’
In 1960 Clark’s investigation of the plane developed in the series known as ‘Bichos’, which translates from Portuguese as ‘animal’ or creature’. Made from hinged metal plates, some circular, others horizontal, these objects were explicitly intended to be handled by the viewer. Clark describes in 1960 that: ‘I gave the name “Bichos” to my works of this period because their characteristics are fundamentally organic. Furthermore, the hinge between the planes reminds me of a backbone. The arrangement of metal plates determines the positions of the “Bicho”, which at first glance seem unlimited. When asked how many moves a “Bicho” can make, I reply, “I don’t know, but it knows.”’