Lygia Clark: The I and the You

Curation of Exhibition of pioneering Brazilian artist.
The 'I and the You' marked the first major UK public gallery survey of the pioneering and influential Brazilian artist, Lygia Clark (1920 – 1988, Brazil).

The exhibition focused on Clark’s artistic journey from the mid-1950s to early 1970s, a particularly volatile period in Brazil’s history in which radical modes of artistic practice also emerged. Clark was a central figure in the Brazilian Neoconcrete movement (1959 – 1961). Frustrated by what they felt to be the limitations of ‘Concrete art’, with its emphasis on non-figurative geometric abstraction, Neoconcrete artists pushed for greater experimentation, expression, colour and poetic sensibility in their practices – as well as proposing a shift in how audiences might participate in artworks.

Encompassing paintings, works on paper, a selection of Clark’s renowned ‘Bichos’, as well as other groundbreaking participatory works, The I and the You showed how Clark’s early formal experimentations and growing interest in the philosophy of experience and therapeutic potential of art led to a gradual closure of the gap between the work and the viewer, and ultimately, between art and life.

Catalogue published by Whitechapel Gallery
Contents:
Foreword by Gilane Tawadros
Sonia Boyce Plates
A conversation between (the curators) Asbury, Boyce and Tawadros
Entanglements between Boyce and Clark, essay by Asbury
Lygia Clark Plates