Oil and oleoresin on canvas and wood
Not on view
In this work, lines and planes of color extend beyond the canvas, absorbing the thick wooden frame into the painting’s abstract composition. The frame’s function as a delimiting entity is thus challenged. Consequently, the work “falls to the level of common things, and becomes somehow equivalent with this door or that wall,” Clark explained. Yet space infiltrates the work through four “organic lines,” or gaps, between the canvas and frame. As a hinge between the realm of art and the world beyond, the organic line became symbolically central to Clark’s view of her art.
Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction—The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift, October 21, 2019–March 14, 2020
Provenance
1954, Lygia Clark (1920–1988)
1988 – 1997, Eduardo Clark, Brazil, inherited from the artist
1997 – 2011, Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York and Caracas, purchased from/through Galeria César Aché
2016 / 2018, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired as a gift from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros
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Lygia Clark
Brazilian, 1920–1988 19 works onlineThe notion that the work of art was more like a body than a discrete object was a radical idea that led many Brazilian artists to embrace the viewer’s subjective experience as the main criterion in art making.
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