What You Won’t Find at MoMA’s Lygia Clark Show
Ben Davis, Artnet News
July 2014
I’m late to the party to cover “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988,” the retrospective of this interesting, difficult, underknown Brazilian artist at the Museum of Modern Art. The show focuses on a generous number of her abstract paintings (mainly from the 1950s); a selection of her metal tabletop sculptures made of hinged interlocking plates, the “Bichos” (from the early 1960s); and a final gallery featuring film clips of collective ceremonies that she staged and examples of art-props that she made later in life (from the late ‘60s and 1970s)—soft masks with spices in them and mirrored goggles that let you see yourself—before she at last abandoned art completely to become a sort of healer in the late ’70s. […]