ZURICH.- From 14 November 2025 to 8 March 2026, the Kunsthaus Zürich is staging a major retrospective devoted to the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, one of the most important voices of the Latin American avant-garde. The show is a cooperation with the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin and the first large-scale exhibition of the artist in a German-speaking country – as well as the most exhaustive worldwide since the presentation at MoMA New York in 2014.

*‘If you hold a stone (Marinheiro só) / Hold it in your hand / If you feel the weight / You’ll never be late / To understand’. *

These lines from a song by Caetano Veloso, which became world-famous in 1971, invoke a unique dialogue between music, life and art. Veloso, the leading representative of “Tropicalismo”, dedicated it to the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark – a pioneer who radically revisited the notion of art.

AN ARTIST OF INTERNATIONAL IMPORTANCE

Lygia Clark (1920 Belo Horizonte – 1988 Rio de Janeiro) is one of the most influential artists to come out of South America. Her work wrote art history, blurring the boundaries between artist, artwork and viewer. Clark dispensed with conventional forms of image and object, and developed process-oriented works that could only be created or completed with the active participation of people.

Her approach questioned the museum as institution and our understanding of art as a finished and object-like work. Clark advocated a holistic experience that involves the body and senses and transforms art into an open process.

NEOCONCRETISM AND AN EXPANDED CONCEPT OF ART

As the main representative of Neoconcretism, a movement founded in Rio de Janeiro in 1959, Clark consistently pursued the idea of a body-centred experience of art from the 1960s onwards. Neoconcretism was an association of some ten Brazilian artists who embraced the modular-constructive principles of founding figures such as Theo van Doesburg and Max Bill, but simultaneously emancipated from them in elevating human intuition over rational and mathematical principles.

Propagated as a democratic principle in Europe by Theo van Doesburg during the inter-war period and by Max Bill after the Second World War, “Concrete Art” met with a warm reception in Brazil. It is “democratic” in the sense that art contributes to the construction of a good society with independently minded citizens. Applied to art, it means that each individual element (such as colours and squares) demonstrably has the same value as individual citizens of a democracy. This statement was systematically disseminated in response to the misuse of realist art as an instrument of propaganda by authoritarian regimes.

FROM IMAGE IN SPACE TO BODY

Clark began by expanding the image into space; then, her sculpture evolved an increasingly strong relationship to the body, until she completely abandoned the physical, object-based artwork in the 1970s. No less than then, her walk-through, hands-on installations involve viewers as active participants in their creation.

In this phase of her life, and over the next 25 years up to her death in 1988, Clark devoted herself to exploring the individual and collective body in tandem with her art audience. Clark referred to artworks as “propositions” (propositions for participatory performances) which no longer need an original, but instead are instructions for activating special mudbaths, devices, masks or goggles that opened up a new perspective on the world, but also a more conscious one on ourselves.

This process also harbours the potential for healing, as Clark emphasized, and thus ties in with an enduring interest in this question at the Kunsthaus. For the first time on this scale, visitors can explore some 120 original early works and 50 sensory and participatory replicas side by side in one and the same exhibition.

Clark herself said: “For me, making art is about developing as a person, which is the most important thing of all. Art should not seek to emulate a name or any kind of concept.”

Clark’s practice reflected both the mood of change in her Parisian exile during the 1960s and 1970s and the scars of political oppression in Brazil – but has lost none of its relevance today. The groups of works known as “Bichos” and “Caminhando” are especially well known. The “Bichos” consist of movable metal plates which only take shape in dialogue with the viewer. Clark compared them to living organisms, whose essence arises out of interaction. “Caminhando” (1963) marked a radical cut in Clark’s life and work. Referring to the multi-talented Swiss artist Max Bill’s exploration of the Möbius strip, she developed a series of instructions in which the action itself, rather than the object, constitutes the work of art. “The action is what produces Caminhando. Nothing exists before it, and nothing after it,” Clark wrote.

These works illustrate her break with the representational conception of art, and also signal her closeness to – and demarcation from – Zurich Concrete Art.

FIRST PRESENTATION IN A GERMAN-SPEAKING COUNTRY

The Kunsthaus Zürich, in cooperation with the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, is mounting the first Clark retrospective in a German-speaking country, and the most comprehensive worldwide since MoMA in New York in 2014.

The exhibition features around 120 historical original works from renowned public and private collections in Brazil, the United States, and Europe – many of them on public view for the first time. Additionally, some 50 participatory works have been produced as replicas by the Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark, to give visitors a direct experience of the process-oriented dimension.

This combination of originals and process-oriented proposals is unique in its density, and has been highly challenging both logistically and in terms of mediation.

Developed in close liaison with the Associação Cultural O Mundo de Lygia Clark.
An exhibition by the Kunsthaus Zürich in cooperation with the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Curator: Catherine Hug.

Idea and concept: Irina Hiebert Grun, Maike Steinkamp.