Lygia Pape

Lygia Pape
March 28–July 21, 2019

Fondazione Carriero presents Lygia Pape, curated by Francesco Stocchi, the first solo exhibition ever held in an Italian institution on one of the leading figures of Neoconcretism in Brazil, organized in close collaboration with Estate Projeto Lygia Pape.

Fifteen years after the death of Lygia Pape (Rio de Janeiro, 1927-2004), Fondazione Carriero sets out to narrate and explore the career of the Brazilian artist, emphasizing her eclectic, versatile approach. Across a career spanning over half a century, Pape came to grips with multiple languages—from drawing to sculpture, video to dance and poetry, ranging into installation and photography— absorbing the experiences of European modernism and blending them with the cultural tenets of her country, generating a very personal synthesis of artistic practices. Inserted in the architecture of the Foundation, the exhibition represents a true voyage in the artist’s world, organized in different spaces, each of which delves into one specific aspect of her work, through the presentation of nuclei of pieces from 1952 to 2000. The exhibition provides an opportunity for knowledge, analysis and investigation of an artist whose practice embodies some of the key areas of research of Post-War.

The exhibition Lygia Pape offers visitors a chance to approach the artist’s output and to observe it from multiple vantage points, starting from analysis of her research, a synthesis of invention and contamination from which color, intuition and sensuality emerge. Full and empty, interior and exterior, presence and absence coexist, conveying Pape’s figure and continuous experimentation, sustained by an ability to combine materials and techniques through the use of unconventional modes and languages of expression. Seen as a whole, her research reveals the way each new project develops as a natural evolution of those that preceded it. These connections are highlighted in the display of the works, spreading through the three floors of the Foundation and linked together by a common root, a leitmotif that originates in observation of nature and develops in a maximum formal tension using a reduced vocabulary.
The works on view include Livro Noite e Dia and Livro da Criação, books seen as objects with which to establish a relationship, condensations of mental and sensory experiences. The Tecelares, a series of engravings on wood, combine the Brazilian folk tradition with the Constructivist research of European origin. The exhibition also features Tteia1, the distinguished installation that embodies Lygia Pape’s investigation of materials, the third dimension and the constant drive towards reinvention and reinterpretation of her language.
 Today her work offers interesting tools for the interpretation of the issues of our present, in an approach based less on rules and more on spontaneity, applied by the artist has a key for deconstructing the standards and schemes of preconceptions.