[open the box] Lygia Pape

Fernando Pessoa’s expression seems to be a motto for the work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Pape, as well as for her partners Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. This generation that was born into art with the Brazilian neo-concretism of the end of the nineteen fifties had, in the words of Oswald Andrade, an energy that made it possible to transform the tradition of western abstract art into corporality, resetting it within the specific condition of the tropical universe, in the Brazilian vernacular. For Lygia Pape there is no distinction between figuration and abstraction, between rationality and expression, between corporality and conceptuality. Everything is swallowed up in the anthropophagic vortex of Brazilian culture and everything can be regurgitated as long as sensuality appears intelligently on the surface of the skin.

This erotics of the concept is present in all the moments of her course, from the way she appropriates the languages of abstraction in order to convert them into a grammar of colour, which will soon be combined with text in her paintings and sculptures, as will be developed in many different forms throughout the seventies and eighties.

At the end of the nineties Lygia Pape made a series of works around the memory of Tupinambá, the great federation of native tribes that occupied the Brazilian coast. Red is the colour that unites these works, sometimes feathers also, in the case of the sculptures or the installations. In a painted photograph this dense, bloody red appears as a mantle, or a cloud that covers Rio de Janeiro. In a poem from the same time, Pape wrote:

what mantle?
what mantle
TUPINAMBÁ
h ere
soft peñas
red
blood-red

in
grilled
rituals

GUARÁ
in
CUNHAMBÉBE

in
shoulder
fan-peña-flight

anthropophagic
mind

swallows
spirit and flesh

TOGETHER

It is this anthropophagic union that this table celebrates. It is this erotics of the flesh that is also of the spirit, steeped in the deep history of Brazil, knowing that its specific condition is its universality.

There is a deep anthropology in Pape’s work.

Biography
With several different artistic genres included in her production, Lygia Pape (Rio de Janeiro, 1927-2004) became an unavoidable artist on the contemporary Brazilian art scene. Her background was in Philosophy, and she studied alongside Fayga Ostrower and Ivan Serpa at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. She was a teacher at the Faculdade de Arquitectura de Santa Úrsula and at the Escola de Belas-Artes da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. She belonged to the Frente group and was one of the signatories of the Manifesto neoconcreto, also signed by Hélio Oiticica. After his death she collaborated on the organization and divulging of his work. From the sixties on she has devoted herself to the cinema, whilst continuing to produce sculpture, engraving and artist’s books. In 1967 she participated in the exhibition Nova objetividade brasileira. In 1980 she went to New York on a study grant from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. In 1990 she received the Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte. She participated in exhibitions in Brazil (several at the São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro modern art museums, as well as at the 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the São Paulo Biennial) and abroad, among which: The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, 2000), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto, 2002), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2006), Barbican Art Gallery (London, 2008), Moderna Museet (Stockholm, 2008) and the Venice Biennial (2003 and 2009).

Bibliography
Bienal Brasil século xx (cat.), São Paulo, Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, 1994.
Lygia Pape: gávea de tocaia (cat.), São Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2000.