Lygia Clark and Sonia Boyce review – pull on a bodysuit and play!
Hettie Judah, The Guardian
October 2024
Art museums fetishise authenticity. They are archival, collecting and conserving precious, rare and original artefacts. This serves some types of art well, but others less so. For artworks made to be handled and played with, in particular, it has a deadening effect. Once an object enters an archive, playing and handling are out of the question.
The Whitechapel Gallery has chosen to behave in an excellently unmuseumlike way for The I and the You, which invites you to get touchy with the Brazilian artist and art therapist Lygia Clark (★★★★☆). This condensed exhibition follows Clark as she makes a journey to the outer boundaries of “proper” art. As a painter in the 1950s, she took inspiration from tectonic, quasi-architectural abstractions painted by Russian artists earlier in the century. Her crisply rendered and geometrically restrained drawings and paintings were informed by thoughts about the interaction of shapes and lines, of interiors and exteriors. They led to playful architectural sculptures, some made from matchboxes. […]