Mute Thought
Thomas Waller, Los Angeles Review of Books
December 2025
The Art of Lygia Clark is unusually well suited to the form of the retrospective. Over a career spanning more than three decades, she experimented with a range of approaches to art-making, from geometric abstraction and participatory sculpture to performance and art therapy. Because she moved between practices more or less chronologically, it is possible to periodize her trajectory as an immanent succession of phases, each tied to the exhaustion of a specific problem of form or technique. According to this narrative, Clark’s early abstract works of the 1950s culminate in her epochal attack on the picture plane, at which point her paintings jump off the wall to become manipulable objects or “critters,” whose reliance on viewer participation segues into her final interest in modes of sensory experience, before she ultimately abandons art in 1977. […]