Mute Thought

Thomas Waller on Lygia Clark at Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

By Thomas WallerDecember 24, 2025

• Art & Architecture

THE ART OF Lygia Clark is unusually well suited to the form of the retrospective. Over a career spanning more than three decades, she experimented with a range of approaches to art-making, from geometric abstraction and participatory sculpture to performance and art therapy. Because she moved between practices more or less chronologically, it is possible to periodize her trajectory as an immanent succession of phases, each tied to the exhaustion of a specific problem of form or technique. According to this narrative, Clark’s early abstract works of the 1950s culminate in her epochal attack on the picture plane, at which point her paintings jump off the wall to become manipulable objects or “critters,” whose reliance on viewer participation segues into her final interest in modes of sensory experience, before she ultimately abandons art in 1977.

The retrospective spatializes this temporal sequence within the four walls of the gallery, allowing visitors to leapfrog among sections as the artist had once migrated between practices. Such was the format of the recent exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which followed the example of similar shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in presenting Clark’s oeuvre as an unbroken line of investigation into the interactive possibilities of artistic form, one that is nonetheless punctuated by moments of breakthrough and rupture. Accompanied by a lively curatorial program of tours and performances, as well as an international symposium on the transcultural significance of the artist’s work, Lygia Clark: Retrospective provided a comprehensive overview of a figure who straddled the border between modern and contemporary art.

One of the reasons that Clark continues to intrigue and beguile contemporary audiences is that her work calls to mind a host of art-critical terms, none of which quite fits the bill. She has been called, variously, a painter, a sculptor, a modernist, a performance artist, a psychotherapist, an institutional critic, a pioneer of installation art, an avant-gardist, a feminist, a body artist, and a mystic. The avalanche of categories speaks to something that eludes classification. This tendency to resist subsumption under universals like school or medium—what Theodor Adorno diagnosed as the growing “nominalism” of the work of art—helps to explain why the retrospective is such a fitting lens through which to encounter Clark’s oeuvre. Collected in the aggregate, what emerges is the absence of any single concept that would positively unite the items in the exhibition, which are held together rather by a law of movement that runs between them.

In a text from 1980, Clark came up with a concise name for this resistance to categorization. Taking stock of recent developments in her work, she spoke of “a general crisis of expression” according to which terms like authorship and genre lose the meaning they had formerly been thought to possess. This enigmatic but profound “conceptual change” blurs the boundaries between the individual and the collective, dividing art between what it already was and what it could yet become. After a surreal succession of erotically charged images—rivers of urine, shape-shifting breasts, apocalyptic landscapes—Clark signed off the piece with a single phrase, repeated once and transcribed in majuscule: “PENSAMENTO MUDO / PENSAMENTO MUDO.”

Mute thought is the labor of the negative. It courses through Clark’s art as a contrapuntal rhythm of impasse and resolution, propelling her into a series of increasingly participatory practices that have come to dominate the landscape of contemporary art. The retrospective format stages the immanent unfolding of this process by presenting each step forward in the artist’s trajectory as the logical consequence of the impasse that preceded it, stacking the deck by presupposing the finish line in advance. When encountered sequentially, Clark’s works are experienced in the future anterior: they are intelligible in terms of what they will have become, and make sense only as the organic results of what came before them.

The earliest pieces in the show at the Neue Nationalgalerie were impressive if still ultimately derivative attempts to soak up and repurpose the various painterly vocabularies of modernist abstraction. In hindsight, these exercises in light and composition seem to foreshadow Clark’s later assault on the integrity of the picture plane. However, earthly shapes are still discernible beneath the jostling fragments of color, tethering the works to a representational sphere from which they seem to be struggling to liberate themselves. The Composição series (1948–56) features a range of such objects: an egg-like thing sliced up into morsels of melancholy blue, a kind of upturned vase pulverized by descending beams of light, an inverted guitar swept up in a jumble of geometric forms. Inspired by her studies in Paris with the cubist painter Fernand Léger, Clark was at this point unwilling to give up the comforting fiction of pictorial depth, sparing the surface from the destructive attack that it would undergo in the works of the late 1950s.

De Stijl is a palpable but inhibiting influence over these works, as if Clark had to take a detour through emulation in order to arrive at originality, forsaking the language of her teachers only after she had exhausted its possibilities. In two paintings from the early section of the show, rows of colored squares are interwoven with vertical bars that appear to go in front and behind them, lending the canvas a latticelike quality. This artisanal motif anticipates the focus on materiality that would emerge later in Clark’s career. But the reference to the grids of Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian lacks their sharpness and frontality, clustering too heavily in the center to be perceived as all-over unities. Moreover, the assumption is still that painting is something that happens inside the frame, marooned from its physical surroundings—an autonomous function that she would sublate in the next phase of her career.

The flash point came in 1954 with Clark’s deployment of a simple but explosive technique. By opening up a gap between the wooden frame and the canvas, she incorporated the world outside the work as a material element of construction. This cleft of negative space—what Clark called the “organic line”—is drawn into perceptual experience in a way that disabuses the painting of its autonomy, puncturing the work with a real void that both preexists and outlasts the beholder’s encounter with it. It is as if someone had suddenly smashed the glass pane of painterly illusion, allowing the art object to take a much-needed breath of air. Yet Clark at this stage still preserved the autarky of the medium she was attacking, adhering to the traditional mode of wall-bound presentation, even as she harbored its dissolution.

The frame is conventionally thought to be a sign of cohesion, the border within which art retains its sanctity and beyond which life exists as a world apart. The organic line detonated this distinction by introducing a recalcitrant nonart element into painting, shattering the semblance of separation like a pistol shot at the opera. In each of the Quebra da Moldura (1954) pieces featured in the show, the absent center pulls our gaze to the periphery of the work, where a fissure of empty space cleaves the canvas and the frame. This narrow aperture bleeds into the composition as a disruptive force that calls on the viewer to integrate negativity into the sphere of meaning. And yet, despite its iconoclastic effect, the organic line here still requires the containment of the canvas in order to register as destructive. These works want to jump over their own shadow by pronouncing the death of painting without deposing it from the wall, an impasse that Clark would resolve through the switch to horizontality in the early 1960s.

The breakthrough from the early experiments with figurative abstraction to the first organic line paintings was accentuated in the glass hall of the Neue Nationalgalerie by the lack of a clear demarcation line between these two periods. Moving seamlessly from the imitation of grids to the destruction of the frame allowed visitors to apprehend their difference. The third section of the exhibition—covering works from 1955 to 1959—saw a set of important shifts in Clark’s practice. Exchanging the canvas for plywood boards, she transferred the organic line to the surface of the work, where it carved up the picture plane into a collection of modular units. By the late 1950s, Clark’s color palette had also mostly been pared down to black and white, using industrial paint partially applied with a spray gun. The double effect of these changes in technique was to efface the gesture of the artist while drawing out the objecthood of the work.

Among the standout pieces from this phase of Clark’s career are the Unidades (1958–59), a series of small, square monochrome paintings, scattered across the wall of the gallery as if by a dice throw. The organic line bores into the surface of these works like a rivet of negativity, irrigating the black lacquered plywood with the real space existing outside its borders. The result is an uneasy tessellation in which planes of color are held together in division, as though they might suddenly slide apart or come undone, drop from the wall like ripened fruit. In the painting series Planos em superfície modulada (1954–58), the incisions are tighter and less airy, resembling the crevices that separate the tiles of parquet flooring. But in each case, the effect is the same: by including the surface as an element of construction, the content of the work becomes its own materiality, subverting traditional ideas about painting as a vehicle for theatrical illusion.

Clark’s interest in materiality and participation finds its logical conclusion in the Bichos or “critters” of the early 1960s. Installed on low podiums, these works are hinged metal plates that can be manipulated into a series of possible permutations, none of which feels quite right. Fold, twist, reverse, flip, open, invert, close—the objects will not hold together in an integral unity, as if there’s always a panel missing or one panel too many. This refusal of transcendence recalls the “new three-dimensional work” envisioned by Donald Judd in his seminal essay “Specific Objects” (1965). However, unlike the minimalists, Clark believed that her works required the participation of the beholder in order to be activated. Suspended between wholeness and fragmentation, the Bichos posit their own insolubility, demanding an answer they also seem to foreclose.

In addition to the original works, the exhibition contained facsimiles of the Bichos, giving gallerygoers the chance to experience the frustration for themselves. In the adjacent section of the show were the Trepantes (1964–65), or “climbers,” which are thin metal sheets pressed into Möbius strips and coiled around rough-hewn stumps of wood. Rather than a neutral pedestal holding up the artwork, the wooden support is here pulled into the sphere of meaning. The result is a reversal whereby what is traditionally auxiliary to art is offered up to aesthetic contemplation, while the art object itself inches groundward as if trying to flee its own concept. Just as Clark had negated the medium of painting by breaking the frame that contains it, so do the Trepantes destabilize the autonomizing function of the sculptural plinth, troubling the line between where art stops and begins.

The Möbius strip had been a popular device among the Brazilian Constructivists of the 1950s, to whom Clark formerly belonged. However, it did not emerge in her practice until the early 1960s, after she had left her Constructivist phase behind. In the instruction work Caminhando (1963), Clark asked participants to fold a piece of paper into a Möbius strip and begin cutting it lengthwise. Once the scissors returned to their starting point, the participants would have to make a decision—left or right—to avoid severing the paper in two. The artwork is reduced to the time taken to assemble and destroy it, while the trace of the artist disappears into confetti-like debris. This subtraction liberated Clark from the prison house of medium, preparing the ground for the sensory propositions of the next phase of her research. However, by forgoing the limits her work had been striving to move beyond, she wound up at an impasse that would lead to her abandoning art altogether.

Beginning in the late 1960s, Clark’s art underwent a series of radical permutations: facture was replaced by found objects, contemplation gave way to participation, action abolished autonomy, the artist was supplanted by the group. Accordingly, in the final sections of the retrospective, visitors were confronted with a series of sensory “propositions,” including a plastic bag filled with water and seashells (Água e conchas, 1966), cloth hoods scented with herbs and flowers (Máscaras sensoriais, 1967), a pair of goggles equipped with adjustable mirrors (Óculos, 1968), and an installation simulating the act of giving birth (A Casa é o corpo, 1968). Notwithstanding their different uses of everyday materials, each of these works displaces the labor of activation onto the bodily experience of the participant. In this way, Clark’s art disintegrated into a potentially infinite number of material forms, immobilizing the logic of progression that had propelled the earlier phases of her work.

The importance of this shift in Clark’s trajectory is indexed by the difficulty of adequately describing it. The assault on traditional mediums like painting and sculpture, for instance, recalls Lucy Lippard’s famous thesis on the dematerialization of the art object. However, rather than disavow the aesthetic dimension of the work, Clark’s late experiments were steeped in sensuous materiality. The inclusion of the body as a site for artistic experience also evokes works like Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece (1964). Yet whereas Ono offered up her own body as an object to the audience, Clark’s late works originate in the sensory activity of the participant, eclipsing the presence of the artist. As Yve-alain Bois remembers, Clark emphatically rejected the comparison of her work with body art or happenings, insisting that it “had nothing to do with any performance whatsoever.”

The singularity of Clark’s art is that it both demands and eludes the act of categorization, summoning up a series of art-critical terms with which it refuses to be identified. This nominalist tendency is brought out most fully in the participatory works of the late 1960s, realizing Clark’s lifelong interest in the phenomenology of activation. Although they represent the culmination of her trajectory, these were also somehow the least interesting pieces in the show. They are too familiar to be critical, too user-friendly to defamiliarize, too theatrical to transform. The paradox is that because Clark’s early attack on aesthetic autonomy offers a window into the prehistory of the contemporary, it appears to be more radical than the later works that superseded it. What should register as transgression is perceived as a return to order, since the present we inhabit is the future of the modernist past.

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Featured image: Lygia Clark: Retrospective, installation view, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2025. ©Neue Nationalgalerie—Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz/David von Becker.