Brazilian artist Lygia Clark deserves far greater recognition for her revolutionary impact on contemporary art. The groundbreaking artist fundamentally redefined the relationship between art, space, and viewer, transforming the very nature of artistic experience from passive observation to active participation and healing.
Clark's pioneering approach to art as therapy preceded modern medical understanding by decades. While the World Health Organization officially confirmed in 2019 that viewing artworks improves psychological health, Clark had already reached this conclusion and put it into practice during the 1970s. Working from her apartment in Rio de Janeiro, she began functioning as a therapist, conducting confidential sessions with clients ranging from music stars to prostitutes.
Her therapeutic method involved using everyday objects like stones, shells, flowers, and cushions filled with various materials, which she would place on her patients' bodies. The goal was to unlock hidden energies within the body, explore pre-verbal desires, and heal trauma. Through this revolutionary approach, Clark transformed art into therapy and therapy into an art form, creating an entirely new paradigm for artistic practice.
Born in 1920 in Belo Horizonte into an educated middle-class family, Clark initially worked as a painter with a particular interest in concrete art. This artistic movement was especially embraced in 1950s Brazil during a period of democratic growth, as it was perceived as inherently democratic. The Brazilian avant-garde viewed concrete art as contributing to building a better society populated by independent, free-thinking citizens.
The work of Swiss artist Max Bill particularly resonated in Brazil, with his clearly comprehensible and equivalent modules finding fertile ground. However, Clark's paintings represented a much more flexible, organic variant of concrete art. Her color palette was more playful, exploring the subtle gradations between strictly defined primary colors. She also took the liberty of experimenting with diagonal lines, daring to transgress the rigid laws of horizontal-vertical order established by Max Bill and the Zurich Concrete artists.
Clark's subsequent artistic evolution appears to represent a therapeutic treatment of concrete art's overly intellectual sobriety. The Kunsthaus Zurich's major retrospective, now dedicated to the leading representative of Brazilian Neo-Concretism, vividly demonstrates how Clark breathed new life into the rational-mathematical principles underlying Zurich Concrete art by emphasizing human intuition.
She created vibrant variations of concrete painting that seemed to dance in light, while also expanding the image into three-dimensional space. Clark introduced the concept of the "organic line" into her painting, breaking open the canvas by leaving gaps of a few millimeters at the contact points of geometric image fields. This intermediate space marked her path toward three-dimensionality.
Starting in 1959, Clark began creating sculptures she called "Bichos" (Animals) - movable constructions made from aluminum plates with hinges between individual elements. These sculptures, which the artist described as living, could be folded to create multiple configurations. The playful works aimed to provide viewers with a more physical art experience, encouraging direct interaction rather than distant observation.
Clark became increasingly interested in the psychological processes and therapeutic potential of such art experiences, eventually turning completely away from physical-object-based artworks. Her invitation "Please Touch" represented a radical taboo-breaking gesture within traditional exhibition spaces. She created walkable installations and touchable objects (Objetos Sensoriais), including masks that could be worn like helmets, transmitting not only tactile sensations but also sounds and smells.
The Kunsthaus exhibition structure reflects this radical evolution from wall-mounted paintings to performance art in space. Visitors initially encounter display walls and smaller exhibition cabinets under subdued lighting, typical of classical exhibitions showcasing Clark's early paintings and drawings - all testaments to her uninhibited experimental enthusiasm in concrete art. Gradually, the exhibition architecture expands into a sculpture garden and finally opens into a daylight-flooded, wide space organized only by individual stations for different art experiments, where visitors can actively participate by creating Möbius strips from paper strips in the style of Max Bill.
The exhibition culminates in a therapy room with a mattress on the floor and various working tools that Clark herself had used. This "Room for Structuring the Self" represents Clark's legacy and is understood in Brazilian art history not as an example of sensual performance, but as a signpost for art at the border of psychoanalysis.
Clark's contribution to contemporary art can hardly be overstated. Throughout her life, she sought to develop forms of expression that could be experienced and lived. She aimed to liberate art from its corset as a reverently guarded cult object in the sacred halls of museums, no longer seeing herself as a high priestess of fetishistic works, but as a healer who interacted directly with her audience.
This boundary-crossing artist has even managed to bridge an old Zurich divide posthumously through her first exhibition in Switzerland. For the first time, there is cooperation between the Kunsthaus and the Haus Konstruktiv, a quintessentially Zurich institution that houses a collection of around a thousand works of constructive-concrete art, including pieces by Max Bill, Camille Graeser, Verena Loewensberg, and Richard Paul Lohse.
Coordinated with the Kunsthaus presentation, the Haus Konstruktiv is showing an exhibition examining Swiss-Brazilian relationships in concrete art under Max Bill's influence. The Lygia Clark retrospective runs at Kunsthaus Zurich until March 8, 2026, while the concurrent exhibition "Concrete Art. Neoconcretismo" continues at Haus Konstruktiv until January 11, 2026.
