Lot 218
Lygia Clark (1920-1988)
Lot 218 Details
Lygia Clark (1920-1988), Brazilian
UNTITLED COMPOSITION, 1952
Oil on canvas; signed and dated -52 incised in the canvas lower right
29 x 39.5 in — 73.7 x 100.3 cm
Estimate $200,000-$300,000
Additional Images
Provenance:
Antonio Barrozo, Filho Ltd., Rio de Janeiro stamp to the stretcher;
The Estate of Joan Constance Hunt, Toronto
Literature:
Cornelia H. Butler & Luis Perez-Oramas, "Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988", Published in conjunction with the exhibition held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, May 10 - August 24, 2014
Note:
In 2014, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) mounted the first comprehensive retrospective of Lygia Clark's works in 2014. The one-person exhibition entitled “Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988” was held from May 10 to August 24, 2014.
The catalogue for the exhibition is the most comprehensive book on Lygia Clark’s work published in English to date and includes new scholarship as well as a substantial number of previously unpublished writings by the artist. The exhibition included Clarks' entire body of work from her representational paintings and drawings of the late 1940s through her geometric abstractions of the 1950s to the works she called "propositions" produced later in the 1960s. The exhibition included nearly 300 works from the late 1940s - 1960s. The catalogue included several works from the 1952 period which are comparable in compositional elements.
A passage in the catalogue cites a reading of Clark’s work by Ferreira Gullar, poet, philosopher and author of the Manifesto neoconcreto (Neo-concretist manifesto) of 1959. Gullar proposes a narrative whereby Clark’s work emancipates itself from the limiting conventions of painting – flatness, surface, the plane, the frame. The series of paintings characterizing this “emancipation” began in 1952 with a series of abstracts with fields of reliefs and lines.
This lot, inscribed "P40" and indistinctly inscribed: "tela granceza" in pencil to the stretcher, was not exhibited in this retrospective show. It has remained in the present Private Collection in Canada until now.