Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica perfectly described his colleague Lygia Pape by referring to her as a "permanently open seed". Throughout her life and career Pape displayed indeed a great receptiveness towards different ideas and inspirations, adapting and transforming her art, applying her creativity to a series of different creative forms and disciplines - from paintings to sculpture, from engraving to films, poems and installations. Some themes remained, though, such as geometrical shapes and silhouette, movement and a focus on the flux of time, all explored via the invention of a very personal new and refreshing language.
These themes will be explored through the pieces on display in an exhibition dedicated to Lygia Pape launching at the beginning of September at Hauser & Wirth New York .
Born in Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1927, Pape worked throughout the 1950s and 1960s in close dialogue with the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements then active in Brazil.
In affiliating with the Neo-Concrete circle of artists (1959 – 1961), Pape, together with her contemporaries and fellow Concretist dissenters (including Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Reynaldo Jardim, Franz Weissman and Sergio de Camargo) tried to break from the rigid forms of Concrete art and challenge its philosophy, moving towards more sensorial modes of expression.
For the Neo-Concretists art represented indeed more than the materials used to create it, according to their manifesto an artwork is a living being to have a relationship with and to experience through the senses.
Neo-Concretists believed therefore that objectivity and mathematical principles alone were not able to create a new and innovative transcendental visual language.
While Clark's art explored the possibilities of sensorial interaction, Oiticica analysed the spatial and social existence of the marginalized, and Pape's focused on the aesthetic, ethical, and political spheres, also producing videos and installations conceived as metaphors against the Brazilian dictatorship.
As the years passed, Pape also started working with filmmakers shooting films about social issues such as the liminality caused by poverty, illiteracy and exploitation, eventually producing her own experimental documentaries that she considered as anti-films.
From 1972 to 1985, Pape taught semiotics at the School of Architecture at the Universidade Santa Úrsula in Rio de Janeiro, and was appointed professor in the School of Fine Arts of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in 1983 as well.
The exhibition at Hauser & Wirth (6th September - 20th October, so fashion week goers will get a chance to catch it) is the gallery’s first solo presentation of Pape’s work in the United States since announcing worldwide representation of Projeto Lygia Pape in 2016.
The event is going to include a series of works that will display Pape's playful approach to art and her passion for geometries and abstractions.
The exhibition aims at reintroducing visitors to the principles of Neo-Concrete that stated an artwork required the viewer's presence and active participation to become complete.
The event at Hauser & Wirth opens with Pape's most emblematic works, "Ttéia 1A" (1978 / 1979 / 1991), a delicate silver thread installation part of the artist's iconic "Ttéia series", first conceived in 1978.
"Ttéia" is a combination of the Portuguese word for "web" and "teteia", a colloquial word for a graceful and delicate person or thing. Threads intersect and weave in these installations producing the depth and volume of a triangular structure.
The artist revisited the structures in 2003, a year before she died, but this time she recreated them in light shimmering gold-plated copper and came up with ten variations.
Nine of them are on view in this exhibition and will challenge the perceptions of the visitors since, when the light hits them, they will get the impression that the prisms continue infinitely upwards (but the impression will change in accordance with the position of the visitor).
These modernist skyscrapers and monoliths of light introduce to the next pieces: Pape's "Amazoninos" (1989 – 92), large iron wall-mounted sculptures inspired by the aerial view of the Amazon forest, perfectly embody the artist's research into space, volume, colour, and form.
"Amazoninos Vermelho (Red Amazoninos)" (1989 / 2003) and the massive five-part "Amazonino Vermelho e Preto (Red and Black Amazonino)" (1989 / 2003) look as if they were joyfully exploding from the walls, they are industrial compositions visually and interactively mesmerising the viewers, inviting them to step into the geometries of their architectures.
The second floor of the exhibition features three important artworks – "Roda dos Prazeres (Wheel of Pleasures)" (1967), "Jogo de Ténis (Tennis Game)" (2001) and a series of collaborative collages produced with Concrete artist Ivan Serpa during the 1970s that mark Pape's increasing emphasis on participatory projects, collage, and video installations.
"Roda dos Prazeres (Wheel of Pleasures)" (1967) comprises vessels filled with bright liquids: small medicine droppers allow visitors to sample the coloured solutions, proving pleasure and dissatisfaction as the unknown liquids range in taste from pleasant to unpleasant.
"In this way," Pape wrote about the installation in 1980, "an ambivalence of the senses was created: the eye saw one thing and was delighted, but the tongue might reject it. Or it could reinforce what the eye had already devoured, couldn’t it?"
The exhibition concludes on the third floor with Pape's early geometrical "Tecelares" (Weavings), woodcut prints from the 1950s that mark her transition from the Concrete to Neo-Concrete movement.
Pape's "Tecelares" are linked to the "Ttéia" series as these works on paper comprise complex compositions that evoke a charged sense of materiality.
Artworks that could be filed under the "Concrete Art" category for their precision and mesmerising geometric aesthetic, the "Tecelares" evoke in their diagonal lines opening on white rice paper the art of weaving and in their geometrical patterns they call to mind the handiwork of Brazil's traditional and indigenous culture, that, as Pape stated, used geometry to express fundamental principles, like the concept of collective identity.
Onne of the main points of Neo-Concrete was to prompt people to act and engage them into an interaction with a specific piece of art, to counteract the urban alienation created by the modern society and integrate both the intellect and the physical body for meditative experiences.
This is probably the main reason why Pape could be the perfect artist for our days: in her works there is science, mathematics and geometry, but rationalisation is combined with a sense of humanity and an invitation to the viewer to get connected and involved. That sounds like the perfect event then for each and everyone of us: Pape's art nowadays speaks to contemporary visitors trapped in a digital universe and asks them to detach their attention from the screens of their smartphones and engage with the real world. Those willing to do so will see intriguing works of art and meet through them a strong artist who believed that the sensorial is a form of knowledge.
"Lygia Pape" is at Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69th Street, New York, from 6 September through 20 October 2018.
Image credits for this post
All images in this post Copyright and Courtesy Projeto Lygia Pape and Hauser & Wirth
1.
Red and Black Amazonino (Amazonino Vermelho e Preto)
1990
Automotive paint on iron
320 x 280.5 x 91.4 cm
2.
Red and Black Amazonino (Amazonino Vermelho e Preto) (detail)
1990
Automotive paint on iron
320 x 280.5 x 91.4 cm
3.
Tecelar
1953
Woodcut print on Japanese paper
Unique
44.5 x 33 cm
4.
Tecelar
1955
Woodcut print on Japanese paper
Unique
60.8 x 42.2 cm
5.
Tecelar
1959
Woodcut print on Japanese paper
Unique, variant of 3
30 x 54 cm
6.
Drawing (Desenho)
1956
White ink on Japanese paper
Unique
20.8 x 17.8 cm
7.
Tecelar
1953
Woodcut print on Japanese paper
Unique
65 x 44.7 cm
8.
Tecelar
1954
Woodcut print on Japanese paper
Unique
40.2 x 32.7 cm
9.
Untitled
1972
Collage by Lygia Pape and Ivan Serpa
49.8 x 49.8 cm
10.
Object of Seduction (Objeto de Sedução)
1970
Collage, mixed media on paper
36.7 x 54.9 cm
11.
Object of Seduction (Objeto de Sedução)
1970
Collage, mixed media on paper
36.8 x 55 cm
12.
Wheel of Pleasures (Roda dos prazeres)
1967
Porcelain vessels, droppers, water, flavorings, food dyes
Dimensions variable
13.
Mineiro
1968
Color photograph
192.7 x 148.9 cm
14.
Ttéia 1C, Metallic #4
2003
Gold-plated copper
49 x 23.5 x 28 cm
15.
Ttéia 1C, Metallic #10 (detail)
2003
Gold-plated copper
49 x 47 x 14 cm / 19 1/4 x 18 1/2 x 5 1/2 in
16.
Ttéia 1C, Metallic #8
2003
Gold-plated copper
49.5 x 36.8 x 27.9 cm / 19 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 11 in
17.
Ttéia 1C, Metallic #8 (detail)
2003
Gold-plated copper
49.5 x 36.8 x 27.9 cm
18.
Red Amazonino (Amazoninos Vermelho)
1989/2003
Iron, automotive paint
130.2 x 49.8 x 68.6 cm
19.
Red Amazonino (Amazonino Vermelho)
1989/2003
50.2 x 50.2 x 16.4 cm
20.
Red Amazonino (Amazonino Vermelho)
1989/2003
Iron, automotive paint
57.2 x 50.2 x 43.2 cm
21.
Red Amazonino (Amazonino Vermelho)
1989/2003
Iron, automotive paint
53.3 x 50.2 x 21 cm
22.
Red Amazonino (Amazonino Vermelho)(detail)
1989/2003
120.7 x 50.2 x 114.9 cm
23.
Red Amazonino (Amazonino Vermelho)
1989/2003
120.7 x 50.2 x 114.9 cm
24.
Red and Black Amazonino (Amazonino Vermelho e Preto) (installation view)
1990
Automotive paint on iron
320 x 280.5 x 91.4 cm
25. Relief (Relevo)
1954/1956
Oil on wood
40 x 40 x 5 cm
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