LONDON.- Hauser & Wirth announced worldwide exclusive representation of Lygia Pape, the celebrated Brazilian artist central to the Neo-Concrete movement, who pioneered a unique approach to abstraction. Pape’s experimental practice spanned drawing, sculpture, engraving, installation, choreography, and filmmaking as she moved between mediums to explore geometric form, positive and negative space, the intellectual and physical participation of the spectator, and above all art’s potential to ignite social change. Many of Pape’s works were created in response to rampant political repression in Brazil in the late 1960s, and reflected the artist’s strongly critical views of the government’s social and political hierarchies.
Initially inspired by the formal geometric abstraction of Concrete art, which emerged in Brazil in the early 1950s, Pape started out by making geometric constructions. She later tired of the severity of this prescriptive art form and moved beyond its constraints, becoming a founding member of the Neo-Concrete movement dedicated to the inclusion of art into everyday life. Pape broke away from preconceived artistic categories and from the 1960s onward sought to inject new expressive formulae into abstract art. ‘Art is my way of understanding the world’, she declared.
Projeto Lygia Pape, founded by the artist before her death in 2004 and led today by her daughter Paula Pape, is devoted to promoting the artist’s work and legacy in South America and internationally. Paula Pape, President of the Projeto Lygia Pape, says: ‘On our first project together in 2014, we developed admiration for Hauser & Wirth – their way of building up museum quality exhibitions fascinated us. After that and thanks to the approach of Olivier Renaud-Clément, we began a closer relationship founded on a constant exchange of knowledge and ideas around Lygia Pape’s legacy. It’s with enthusiasm and great pleasure that we are now becoming part of this family.’
Marc Payot, Vice-President and Partner of Hauser & Wirth, commented: ‘We are tremendously honoured to work with the Projeto Lygia Pape, and to have this opportunity to engage with the contributions of an artist so central to the evolution of modern art in Latin America. Pape’s far-ranging vision, brilliant theoretical insights, and revolutionary interdisciplinary approach are particularly relevant to new generations of artists and to today’s diverse international audiences. Her ideas anticipated the work of Minimalism in the United States and pushed the boundaries of abstraction to new and unexpected domains. We are proud to lead the way in a global re-evaluation of her myriad creative achievements.’
Hauser & Wirth will promote Lygia Pape’s work and ideas through new research and scholarship and by securing international exhibition opportunities in order to introduce new audiences to her oeuvre. The gallery’s first exhibition devoted to Pape will go on view in London from 23 September to 19 November 2016.
Projeto Lygia Pape has a long-standing relationship with Hauser & Wirth: the artist’s work has previously been exhibited in the gallery’s group exhibitions ‘LINES’, curated by Rodrigo Moura at Hauser & Wirth Zürich in 2014, and ‘Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016’, the inaugural exhibition of Hauser Wirth & Schimmel Los Angeles that traces ways in which women have changed the course of art by deftly transforming the language of sculpture since the postwar period. ‘Revolution in the Making’ is on view until 14 September 2016.
Lygia Pape (1927 – 2004) was born in Rio de Janeiro. She was an influential artist, active in the Concrete and Neo-Concrete movements in the Brazilian art world. The Neo-Concrete movement with which Pape was affiliated was still based on the non-representational tenets of Concrete art, but, together with her contemporaries, Pape looked to transform Concrete art’s geometric shapes into organic three-dimensional objects, designed to be manipulated by participants and to be experienced sensorially.
In her early Desenhos (Drawings), Pape’s geometric black shapes are reminiscent of musical staves – the lines, cuts, grids and ruptures are suggestive of compositions and variations, intersected by voids, which indicate moments of silence. For Pape, the positive marks and negative spaces were of equal importance in an interpretation of the work. They typify Brazilian geometric abstraction, characterised by an expressive quality and implying the interaction of the viewer in a reading of the work.
From early experimentations with printmaking, Pape developed her Tecelares (Weavings) principally between 1955 and 1959. These works reinterpreted the process of woodcut, casting aside the notion of the ‘multiple’ and creating individual works with an emphasis on the power of expression as opposed to premeditated modes of production. She created a harmony between the geometry of her forms on the paper and the natural grain of her wooden implements, employing the texture of the wood to explore the relationship between reason and nature; creating unity between artistic mechanism and the material’s own expressiveness. Guided by intuition alone, the relationship of her shapes is controlled by what Pape termed, ‘magnetization’. Her mirroring, doubling and negative space interplay to activate the surfaces of her Tecelares. In these pioneering experimentations with woodcut, Pape divorced the medium from its associations with folk art, political propaganda and figuration.
In 1958, Lygia Pape together with other artists, was already creating Neo-Concrete works. Pape began work on her revolutionary Ballets Neo Concretos (Neo-Concrete Ballets), in which she investigated the relationship between art and dance in a plurality of the senses. She took as her theme the ‘non object’, and attempted to remove the human element from dance to activate the space in a display of pure energy and vitality. By omitting muscular expression and body language, Pape created a scenario in which the action and viewer experienced essential form.
Following the military coup of 1964, the political instability in Brazil created a state of uneasiness that caused repercussions in the advancement of Brazilian contemporary art. Pape’s practice became overtly politicised, employing metaphor as a criticism of the status quo, and it was during this period that she made ‘Box of Cockroaches’ (1967) and developed the performance ‘Divisor’ (1968).
Of all of Pape’s works, the most emblematic ones, those that best synthesise her artistic process, are her Ttéias, the first of which was conceived in 1978. Ttéias are constructed by the geometric installation of silver or gold threads in a space, either from the floor to the ceiling or across the corner of a room. In this ethereal series, Pape succeeded in delineating the depth and volume of triangular space to explore spatial relationships thereby creating a human centric work. Her woven webs required human interaction and became ‘magnetized’ three-dimensional space. They delineate volumes and achieve visually powerful and magical effects, charging the space with a sense of the indefinable, the immaterial. The corner installations cast strong shadows across the walls in many directions, creating phantom groups of lines. The groups of thread that course through space are also staggered, and some actually intersect others, literally weaving through the air. Other groups of threads, through the effect of lighting and tricks of perspective, simply appear to intersect: the installations blend the real and the imaginary, letting the viewer discover the work through interaction and inspection. The word ‘Ttéia’, which Pape created, is an elision of the Portuguese word for ‘web’ and ‘teteia’, a colloquial word for a graceful and delicate person or thing.
Recent solo exhibitions include the major travelling retrospective ‘Magnetized Space’ at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain (2011); Serpentine Gallery, London, England (2011), and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2012), as well as a presentation at Museu de Arte Contemporânea Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2000). Her work also was included in the 53rd Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2009).
