For Lygia Clark, Art Was a Means of Survival
Cat Dawson, Hyperallergic
September 2025
Lygia Clark’s current retrospective at the Neue Nationalgalerie makes a compelling argument that art, therapy, and politics are far more intimately related than they are often discussed as being.
Clark was a pivotal member of the Neo-concretists, a group of Brazilian artists who coalesced in the 1950s around geometric abstraction in two and three dimensions. She often worked in the gap between the two, making both painterly sculptures and paintings with sculptural elements to them. But by the 1960s — and following a military coup in 1964 that installed a brutal military dictatorship in Brazil — she and many of her peers increasingly created art that invited contact not only from visitors, but also between them. […]