©O MUNDO DE LYGIA CLARK-ASSOCIAÇIAO CULTURAL, RIO DE JANEIRO/COURTESY LUHRING AUGUSTINE AND ALISON JACQUES GALLERY
New York’s Luhring Augustine and London’s Alison Jacques Gallery announced today that they will now co-represent the estate of Lygia Clark, the Brazilian artist who was the subject of a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 2014. (Jacques had represented Clark since 2010.) Luhring Augustine has slated its first Clark solo show for April.
Clark is best known for her work associated with Brazil’s Neo-Concrete movement, which, like many avant-gardes around the world during the 1950s, experimented with moving painting into the third and fourth dimension, through sculptural works and performances. She used abstraction to evoke painting coming apart, and with her “Bichos” sculptures made works that can be folded and bent.
In the later part of her career (she died in 1988), Clark created therapy-like performances in which viewers were encouraged to interact with her sculptures. With their ambitions of moving art beyond the gallery space and ultimately having an impact on the real world, these works prefigure some of the social practice work that younger artists have developed in recent years.