Artist: Lygia Clark

Curated by Rolando J. Carmona

Baró Galeria presents Lygia Clark: Anatomie d’une ligne, the second exhibition dedicated to the Brazilian artist by the gallery and its first exhibition at its space in Paris. The exhibition opens a new exhibition cycle for Baró Galeria in the city. Founded in São Paulo in 1999, with its headquarters in Mallorca, Spain, and a branch in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, Baró Galeria now establishes a permanent presence in Paris. At its Paris location, the gallery develops a program that brings together historical works and emerging artists from the Global South. This new space opens with an exhibition dedicated to Lygia Clark, one of the most significant figures of twentieth century art.

Curated by Rolando J. Carmona, the exhibition examines how Lygia Clark’s practice engaged, throughout her career, the relationship between the body, psychoanalysis, and geometric abstraction. This network of relationships pursued the dissolution of the body, materializing a form of plasticity in which the line is eroticized as a means to rethink geometry and to connect with different levels of perception, ultimately abandoning the physical body to engage with the deepest layers of the unconscious.

Clark conceived the artwork as an experience or as a body that interacts with the viewer, a position she formally adopted after signing the Neo Concrete Manifesto in 1959. From her early drawings of deconstructed chairs, which anticipate the geometric structures of the Bichos, to her later relational objects and participatory propositions, the exhibition traces the development of aesthetic and psychological strategies that challenged conventional distinctions between artwork, artist, and viewer.

A central figure of twentieth century art, Lygia Clark belonged to a generation of Latin American artists who became part of the creative effervescence of Paris, rethinking modernity through a Latin American perspective. Between 1950 and 1952, she studied in Paris with Isaac Dobrinsky, Fernand Léger, and Arpad Szenes. Later, during the Brazilian military dictatorship, Clark went into self exile in Paris. From 1968 to 1976, she experienced an intense period of experimentation, during which the boundaries between her life and her work once again became blurred. Her engagement with psychoanalytic treatment, first with Daniel Lagache and later with Pierre Fédida, directly informed the development of an artistic practice in which psychoanalysis became a structuring element.

During this period in Paris, Clark was invited to teach a course on gestural communication at the Sorbonne. It was in this context that she developed a series of propositions titled Corpo coletivo, involving experiential sessions with groups of up to sixty participants. The works Baba Antropofágica and La Red, presented in this exhibition, emerged from these practices. In La Red, the modern grid is destabilized and becomes an amorphous structure over the bodies of a collective attempting to escape or move within a viscous atmosphere generated by elastic bands. A significant part of the propositions presented in this exhibition were conceived during Clark’s time in Paris.

The exhibition includes studies, photographs, cardboard maquettes produced in the 1950s for the Bichos, as well as Bicho Desfolhado (579), presented alongside related materials, offering a focused view of a key moment in Clark’s artistic trajectory.

The presentation takes place within a broader context of renewed institutional attention to the artist in Europe. In 2024, Lygia Clark was the subject of a major retrospective at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, currently traveling to Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland.