#dated1960
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patrickkapty.bsky.social
Bicho - Monumento a Todas as Situações
aluminum sculpture
1960
Lygia Clark
Brazilian, 1920-1988

#aluminum #sculpture #abstract #geometric #modernism #moderndesign #handmade #lygiaclark #Brazil #dated1960 #actionart
Lygia Clark was born October 23, 1920, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. According to her writings, she had a difficult childhood; she mentions traumatic and abusive experiences and suggests that she may have stayed in a mental institution at some point during her childhood (Butler 235). She married Aluízio Clark Ribeiro in 1938 at the age of eighteen, and the pair had three children: Elizabeth (1941), Álvaro (1943), and Eduardo (1945). Clark seems to have had trouble with the idea of motherhood throughout her life. As she explains in a 1971 letter to Hélio Oiticica, a close companion and regarded as her artistic counterpart, she felt that “as a mother I have nothing left to give, even in relation to my children. I am tired of being the mother and the father also.” (Butler 20) cites her last pregnancy and subsequent “postpartum psychoses” as the beginning of her artistic career (Davis), and in 1947 she moved to Rio de Janeiro to pursue her art, studying with landscape artist Roberto Burle Marx (Carvalho). Artists of the Grupo Frente in 1956. Lygia Clark can be seen on the far right. From 1950 to 1952, she lived in Paris with her children, studying under artists such as Fernand Léger and other painters. She and her husband divorced in 1953, and in 1954 she participated in the first exhibition of the artists’ group “Grupo Frente.” (Butler 311) During this period, she worked mainly on paintings but was already beginning to question the notion of space in traditional painting, working hard to cultivate what she referred to as the “organic line” in such works as Modulated Space and Egg. She traveled to Rio de Janeiro and to Belo Horizonte frequently to work and to participate in exhibitions. During the 1960’s, her work transitioned from painting and sculpture to more subjective, interactive pieces, such as the Bichos group of movable sculptures and others such as Cocoon and Trepante, which often incorporated metal and wood structures. Her work sought to create art not as a static object but as an interactive experience between the spectator and the piece using “a mode that accounted for time and change through the experience of the viewer (Butler 20). In 1963, she created her Caminhando work, which many consider to be her breakthrough in transitioning from the art object to what she called a “proposition” -the idea of action, prompted by the artist, as an art piece. In 1968, she returned to Paris due to the political repression of these times and was offered a position teaching a course at the Sorbonne in 1972. Clark returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1976. She continued her work into the 1980’s focusing more narrowly on individual art therapy, which involved psychoanalytic ideas and sensory objects similar to those in her earlier works. Clark died April 26, 1986. Lygia Clark (Belo Horizonte, Brazil, 1920 - Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1988) is one of the preeminent artists of the twentieth century, whose pioneering body of work reimagined the relationship between audience and the art object. A founding member of the 1950s Brazilian Neoconcretist movement, Clark proposed a radical approach to thinking about painting by treating its pictorial surface as if it were a three-dimensional architectural space. Experimenting with modulations of form, color, and plane, her early abstract works harbored compositions that challenged the canvas’s edge and extended the visual field of painting into the physical realm of the viewer. Her iconic Bichos, or sculptures constructed out of hinged metal planes, allowed for the audience to exercise authorship through participation. Clark’s reliance on the viewer to steer her sculptures through many possible configurations not only jeopardized the autonomy of the art object itself, but also reconfigured her art as a performative, time-based event. Shifting her focus towards phenomenology and what would later be termed social practice, she invited her audience to engage with objects that triggered sensations and personal memories, and heightened the viewer’s awareness of self. Throughout her lifetime, Clark would remain a seminal figure of the international avant-garde, impacting future generations of artists with her transformative ideas surrounding the body, its presence, and agency within a given environment.
April 30, 2025 at 2:27 PM
augustina.bsky.social
I don't know what's more disturbing.

~ The dollar store Elf guarding the toilet paper

~ The really badly dated1960's(?) bathroom at work

~ Or the fact that after working here almost 14-years, today, looking at this photo, is the first time I've noticed the hole in the vanity.
The 10-year-old Christmas Elf who pops up throughout the year in different spots in the bathroom at work. In this photo, he/she is guarding the role of toilet paper and has snagged a piece to put in it's belt. The bathroom has super bad Lino with 1960's patterns and inexplicitly there is a square hole cutout in the side of the counter that in 14 years, the person taking the photo had never noticed before.
December 15, 2024 at 10:29 AM