An art innovator gets a major retrospective

The Brazilian artist Lygia Clark (1920-1988) was one of the main representatives of Neoconcretismo. She saw art as an organic structure that communicates with the viewer. She expressed this approach particularly in her moving sculptures, the bichos: the viewers redesign the sculptures by arranging moving parts as they wish. The viewers become participants. Replicas were made especially for the exhibition in Berlin, allowing visitors to experience Clark's intentions. With around 120 works on loan from international museums such as the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, the Neue Nationalgalerie is presenting the artist's first retrospective in Germany. Her entire artistic oeuvre, spanning from the 1940s to the 1980s, is represented: geometric-abstract paintings, relief-like panels, participatory sculptures and performative works – which are regularly performed in the exhibition – through to Clark's late therapeutic reflections, which included her artworks. Lygia Clark. Retrospective opens on May 23 and runs until October 12.

Clark played a central role in the neo-concrete avant-garde of the late 1950s. She lived in Paris from 1968 to 1977 to escape the military dictatorship in Brazil. For a time, she taught as a professor at the Sorbonne. In 1968, she represented Brazil at the Venice Biennale. Despite her work in Europe, her experimental oeuvre, which also explored the therapeutic effects of art, has only been more widely received outside Brazil since the late 1990s. One of her largest exhibitions was at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2014: Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988.

The exhibition in Berlin was created in cooperation with the Kunsthaus Zürich, where it will be on display from fall 2025 to spring 2026.