Beschreibung:

Lygia Clark Bicho parafuso sem fim 1960 gold anodized aluminum 18 1/2 x 22 1/2 x 19 in. (47 x 57.2 x 48.3 cm.) Dimensions vary according to configuration. This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity issued by the Estate of Lygia Clark numbered 698.
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Private Collection, Rio de Janeiro Private Collection, New York Exhibited Barcelona, Fundació Antoni Tàpies Lygia Clark 22 October- 21 December 1997, then travelled to Marseille, Le Musée d'Art Contemporain (16 January- 12 April 1998), Porto, Fundação Serralves (30 April- 28 June 1998), Brussels, Société des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts (24 August- 27 September 1998), Rio de Janeiro, Paço Imperial (8 December 1998- 28 February 1999) Video LYGIA CLARK 'Bicho parafuso sem fim', 1960 Bicho, the colloquial Portuguese term for “animal”, “insect” or “beast”, refers directly to the organic world, and Lygia Clark's philosophy that the work has a mind of its own. The artist prized above all the sense of reciprocity that emerged between her objects and their viewers. As a leading figure in Brazil's Neo-Concrete movement, it was important to the artist that the work functioned as an instrument of engagement. Laura Gonzalez, the Head of the Latin America Sale, further contextualizes 'Bicho' here both as part of Lygia Clark's larger series, and in the history of Brazilian art at large. Catalogue Essay Lygia Clark’s current retrospective exhibition at MoMA is entitled The Abandonment of Art. Such a provocative title suggests it might be an opportune moment in which to reconsider how significant the Bichos series were within her trajectory beyond the so-called boundaries of art. The title of the exhibition refers to the idea of breaking the limits of what might have then been acceptable to define as “art”. Lygia Clark’s “radical leap”, as art critic Guy Brett described it, had not occurred, as one could suspect, out of an absolute rupture from her previous practice. In fact, it developed through a gradual and coherent process of accumulative “steps” in which the Bichos could be considered as perhaps the most significant stage within the overall transition. While her career as an artist was initiated firmly within the field of painting, her progression through the abstract geometric or Neo-Constructivist tendencies, which were so influential within Latin America during the course of the 1950s, took her to question the relationship between the work and its frame, gradually incorporating the latter within the former. Having bridged the borderline established by the frame, Clark focused her attention on the dividing lines within the composition itself. Her work also rejected any association with the “craft” of painting—the individual brushstroke— preferring instead to construct the “picture” out of separate panels, themselves painted “industrially” through the prior application of spray-paint. The series of works entitled Superfícies Moduladas brought with them the interest in the line that divided one panel from the other: a negative space which emerged from the gap between each panel. This “gap” she entitled “the organic line” since in her opinion it was the key to the perceptual possibilities offered by the overall disposition. A subsequent series of works, the Contra Relevos, displaced the panels away from the single plane of the painting, bringing the work out into three-dimensional space. The Bichos are therefore the logical consequence of this progression. Their innovative characteristic is that the panels are not only linked by an organic line but, since this line is now articulated, it determines the diverse possibilities of the work’s disposition in space through the manipulation of the spectator. For Clark, the process of asserting an ever increasing importance to this line led the work to offer a more profound relationship with the spectator, one which shifted from a purely perceptive to a participatory character. The significance that such a transition represented for the artist herself is suggested by the very name she ascribed this new series of works. While her denomination for previous series related to the structures and objects of art— such as reliefs, surfaces and so fort