Lygia Pape. The Skin of ALL

About

The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is dedicating the first comprehensive solo exhibition to the Brazilian avant-garde artist Lygia Pape (1927–2004). Titled “The Skin of ALL,” the exhibition presents the artist’s multifaceted, transgressive oeuvre, which she developed over five decades.

Lygia Pape, together with Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, was one of the key figures of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s. Her specific understanding of geometric abstraction resulted in a radical new conception of concrete-constructivist art. In addition to ethical and socio-political issues, Lygia Pape made her poetic works fruitful for experimental experiences that involved all the senses.

The exhibition at K20 includes abstract-geometric paintings, drawings, reliefs, unique woodcuts, two ballet compositions, and poems, as well as films, multisensory experiments, collective performances, and immersive spatial installations.

Two repressive periods of dictatorship (1937–1945 and 1964–1985) and a productive period of cultural, urban, and economic modernization characterized the ambivalence of these years in Brazil. With the founding of two major art museums—the Museu de Arte Moderna São Paulo (1947) and the Museu de Arte Moderna Rio de Janeiro (1948)—the establishment of the São Paulo Biennial (1951), and the construction of the new capital Brasília (1956– 1960), designed by Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, Brazil developed in the mid-twentieth century into a cosmopolitan center of attraction and a lively, transcultural zone beyond the hitherto dominant art metropolises in Europe and the United States.

It was in this climate that Lygia Pape developed her specific understanding of geometric abstraction. She was a member of the Grupo Frente (1954–1956) and of the Neo-Concrete Movement (1959–1961) in Rio de Janeiro together with artists and critics such as Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa, Mário Pedrosa, Ferreira Gullar, and Reynaldo Jardim.

At the center of her artistic interest was the liberation of the work of art from a static form and the concept of the open work. Pape became preoccupied with the European avant-garde—especially with Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich—as well as with philosophers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Susanne K. Langer, while at the same time situating herself in the Brazilian cultural tradition with concepts such as anthropophagy. In clear demarcation from a purist, rational orientation of concrete art, as pursued by Max Bill, for example, but also by the Grupo Ruptura in São Paulo, Pape included all the senses in her participatory works and declared the corporeally involved viewers as active participants in the actual creation of her works.

The Liberation of the Work of Art—Lygia Pape and Brazil’s Neo-Concrete Movement

The oil painting “Pintura” (1953), acquired by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, marks her artistic beginnings, in which Lygia Pape was already exploring an abstract visual language and color as a sensual means of expression. Her subsequent series of abstract geometric paintings, created between 1954 and 1956, dynamize the pictorial space through a play of free-floating abstract forms and lines on a white ground. The “Relevos” (1954–56), which developed further into the space, involve the viewers as activated participants in the dynamized processes of perception.

Parallel to this, Lygia Pape began to work with the medium of the woodcut in 1953. The so-called “Tecelares” (1953–1960) are one of her most important and largest groups of works of the Neo-Concrete phase. In the abstract, mostly unique woodcuts, the strict geometric forms combine with the sensual qualities of the material and the lively structure of the wood to create exceptional works. Her drawings, created at the same time, also explore ambivalent spatial relationships with their finely drawn ink lines and evoke musical notations with their rhythmic structures, which already anticipate her late “Ttéias” spun from gold and silver threads. With her haptically manipulable “Livro da criaçao” (1959), which tells the story of the creation of the world, Pape finally liberated the work from static form. Central to the Neo-Concrete phase are also the two interdisciplinary abstract ballets “Ballet neoconcreto I” and “Ballet neoconcreto II” (1958 and 1959), in which geometric forms move in space, as well as her wall-filling “Livro do tempo” (1961–63). For this, she developed variations of 365 abstract reliefs from the shape of the square, sketching the days of a year as a story to be explored subjectively. Her “Livros dos Caminhos” (1963/1976) point as abstract reliefs to the dynamized human assemblages of the “Espaços imantados” (from 1967 onwards), as well as to the collective body in “Divisor” (1967).

With the establishment of the military dictatorship in 1964, Lygia Pape withdrew from the visual arts for several years and occupied herself with experimental films in the environment of the Cinema Novo, for which she designed opening credits and posters. Under the impression of increasing repression, from 1967 onwards her works developed into the public space as a place for manifestations of collective agency. This is demonstrated by the work  “Divisor” (1967), initially performed with children from a favela. “Divisor” was subsequently shown in various contexts and locations and became a metaphor of a socio-political collective body. In the extremely productive phase starting in 1967, films, performances such as “O ovo” (1967), and sensory experiments such as “Roda dos prazeres” (1967) were created. They were conceived as open works that could be reproduced by anyone, anywhere, without the artist. With works such as “Eat Me: A gula ou a luxúria?” (1975), sensory experience were made fruitful as a form of knowledge beyond rational systems of thought. In numerous works, Lygia Pape dealt with the creative potential of popular culture or paid tribute to the inventiveness of the alternative architectural structures of the favelas. These works are also to be seen against the backdrop of socio-political and cultural marginalization and oppression.

“The Skin of ALL” at K20

With “Lygia Pape. The Skin of ALL,” the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen is placing a Brazilian artist and her work at the center of a comprehensive solo exhibition for the first time in its history. The museum’s contact with Brazil’s art and cultural-political landscape began early on: In the course of a major world tour (1966–1985), the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen sent the important collection of works by Paul Klee to Brazil as a cultural-political message of a new, democratic post-war Germany. The collection of Klee works had been acquired by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1960 as an act of reparation for an artist ostracized by the National Socialists. At the height of the military dictatorship, it was first shown at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (June 28 – August 14, 1972)—where Lygia Pape must have seen it—and then at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (August 20 – September 19, 1972). However, it took fifty-seven years for the Kunstsammlung to dedicate a chapter to Brazilian modernism in the course of the major research and exhibition project “museum global – Microhistories of an Ex-centric Modernism” (2018/19). In 2020, the Kunstsammlung succeeded in acquiring the early painting “Pintura” (1953) by Lygia Pape, which was then exhibited in the immediate vicinity of works by her European and North American contemporaries in the Kunstsammlung’s permanent collection.

The exhibition presents the multifaceted work of this extraordinary artist and honors Pape as an important and enriching voice within a global art development. Thanks to loans from international collections and the artist’s estate as the main lender, Lygia Pape’s unique oeuvre can finally be presented to a broad public in Germany. With this comprehensive exhibition, the Kunstsammlung is taking a further, long overdue step to advance the expansion of the canon of modern and postmodern art historiography of the Global North.

Curator: Isabelle Malz

An exhibition of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in cooperation with the Projeto Lygia Pape.

The exhibition is supported by Schwarzkopf.