LYGIA PAPE
White Cube presents an exhibition by the artist Lygia Pape (1927–2004). This exhibition traces the trajectory of Pape’s experimental five-decade career, showcasing some of the artist’s most renowned works across drawing, sculpture and installation, through which she pioneered new forms of geometric abstraction that questioned the spatial dynamics between artwork and viewer.
March 22 – May 25, 2024
In the early 1950s, while studying at the Museu de Art do Rio de Janeiro, Pape, together with her artistic peers Aluíso Carvão, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, formed the experimental collective Grupo Frente. Closely associated with the European Concrete movement, the group rejected the Brazilian modernist conventions of the era – which tended towards the figurative – instead engaging with a form of geometric abstraction untethered from observed reality.
The ‘Desenhos’ thus exhibit composite qualities, combining the extreme rationalism of Concrete art with the ‘expressive potential’ of its successor. In these drawings, precise linear trajectories intersect with impulsive stippled markings, giving rise to spherical and angular forms that convey a sense of kineticism. The striations collide, shift, weave and fracture one another with the spontaneity of sketched markings, setting the field in motion.
Pape’s pivotal role in the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement in 1959 signalled a shift in her artistic practice, shaped by a liberation from static form and a move towards heightened sensuality through the interaction of objects in real-time and space. Livro Noite e Dia (Book of Night and Day) (1963–76) is one of Pape’s renowned series of part-book-part-sculptural works where the artist combines methods of painting, relief and bookmaking to chronicle temporality.
In the latter decades of her career, Pape devoted herself to exploring the interstices within and around geometric forms, establishing a dialogue between the cerebral and the intuitive. Belonging to her sculptural series, ‘Volante’, which translates as ‘steering wheel’ or ‘flying’, Pape’s 1999 sculpture features copper-plated iron wheels seemingly poised between stillness and motion.
Comprised of metallic threads and produced by the artist from 1976 through to the early 2000s, featured in this exhibition, Ttéia 1,B (2000) delineates volume through the accumulation of gold threads, giving rise to luminous cylindrical columns. Configured in a staggered formation, these columns traverse the corner of the gallery, intersecting one another.
One of the final works created by Lygia Pape before her death in 2004, But I Fly (2001), a poetic reinterpretation of the word ‘Butterfly’, is a testament to the sublime simplicity with which the artist emphasised the primacy of sensorial experience and its role in the everyday. The film features the artist herself, framed both face-on and in profile, partially obscured by a red fan whose languid, undulating movement ushers the viewer into a deep hypnotic state.