Lygia Pape
25 May - 03 October 2011
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Magnetized Space |
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LYGIA PAPE
Magnetized Space
Curator: Manuel Borja-Villel y Teresa Velázquez
25 May – 3 October, 2011
The work of Lygia Pape (1927-2004) arose in a setting very much
characterised by a spirit of renewal. In Brazil, one of the most
innovative art contexts in the second half of the 20th century, the
tensions inherent in the arrival of modernism coexisted with the
opposite extreme: dictatorships, false economic miracles and cultural
movements based on local considerations, yet doomed to live in exile.
Linked to the Concretism movement of Grupo Frente, she soon became
associated with the Neo-Concrete current, along with artists such as
Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and poets, such as Ferreira Gullar.
Although Pape is often compared to these figures, until now her art has
not received the critical attention that has been given to her
colleagues.
Lygia Pape's activity during her career responds to this need to broaden
the field of the sensitive, a prevalent trend in 1950s Brazil, but in
her case it displays a high degree of coherence in a wide range of
media. At the end of this decade, which inherited the ultra-rationalism
of Brazilian Concretism, she did a series of woodcuts -Tecelares-, which
she understood not as a foreshadowing of reproducibility but rather as a
process of material refinement that gives rise to light: the single
copy was the reflection of the conceptual density with which the process
was understood. In the 1970s she participated in several of Cinema
Novo's film productions, where she designed the credit sequence and
other visual representations. She combined this work with activities at
the Sao Paulo Museo de Arte Moderna, truly an exemplary case of
experimental production involving an active audience. Then in the 1980s
she was influential as a professor at Santa Úrsula University, where she
taught semiotics at the school of architecture and gave students an
alternative pedagogy with which they learned to value vernacular
constructions far from academic dogma. Subsequently she learned to
combine her visual production, geometric in nature, with a certain
homing instinct for tribalism, recalling the hybrid qualities of the
anthropophagic movement of the first half of the century.
Also deserving of special mention are her books, where she imagines a
world based on material praxis and experimentation that give less
priority to the author and instead favour a reader capable of generating
a work other than the written language. Her films for geometric objects
in dance (Ballet neoconcreto, 1958) or her unclassifiable performance
piece Divisor(1968), a textile work meant to be performed collectively
(and reactivated in this exhibition), convey some of the basic ideas of a
space that attracts the audience and its emotions as if it were a
magnetised object.
www.museoreinasofia.es
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