"My concern is always invention. I always want to invent a new language that's different for me and for others, too... I want to discover new things. Because, to me, art is a way of knowing the world." Lygia Pape
A member of Grupo Frente in mid-1950s Rio de Janeiro, Lygia Pape sought to expand the reaches of contemporary art beyond representation and passive engagement. The Grupo Frente movement was comprised of a loose association of artists who rallied around the founding figure of Ivan Serpa, seeking to explore and advance the visual language of European Concretism and geometric abstraction in Brazil. As such, Pape’s artistic vision quietly rejects figuration in the traditional sense. Rather than superimposing representational figures on a background, she went on to create works that would become forms in their own right, existing independently in space and interacting freely with their surroundings. These interests eventually propelled her to embrace Neoconcretism in the late 1950s, and she dedicated her career to fostering creative interaction between an artwork and its viewers.
Grupo Frente, championing the ideas of Max Bill and his contemporaries, argued that Constructivism allowed for greater forms of artistic expression and creative liberty. With their first exhibition in 1954 they advocated the belief that geometry is open to endless exploration and experimentation, since it is not bound by the representational boundaries of realism. Neoconcretism, which counted on Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and Lygia Pape as some of its most prominent voices, emerged as a formal movement in 1959 and it continued the search for artistic freedom that Grupo Frente had set to achieve. The Neoconcretes, however, considered the artistic theories put forth by Concretism to be reductive and formulaic. The believed that Grupo Frente’s view of art as purely self-referential failed to account for the importance of artistic process and viewer involvement. They expanded on the Concrete aesthetic and experimented with innovative mediums like video, performance, and interactive sculptures, designed to engage the public in both physical and intellectual ways.
Created roughly in between her affiliation with Grupo Frente and her embracing of Neoconcretist values, the present lot is a fascinating glimpse into the intellectual and aesthetic debates that permeated Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in the mid to late 1950s. In Untitled (Desenho) Pape evokes the simplicity of the square and the line, turning it into a vibrant composition that quickly absorbs her audience. Her intricate draftsmanship and compositional dexterity simulate movement in a space that appears to transcend the paper surface. The dizzying effect of the thin, uniform lines is upended by the superimposed rectangles, whose visual acrobatics add a unique layer of dynamism to an otherwise geometric and consistent landscape.
It was her fascination with form in all its manifestations that led Pape to distance herself from Grupo Frente in the late 1950s. In her eyes, art is not self-contained but rather uncontainable, and its beauty largely results from its interaction with the world. She believed that an artwork is invariably influenced by conditions outside of its medium, and these surrounding forces can alter the work’s very meaning and potential. Pape’s body of work thereby presents a thorough questioning of the modernist art historical canon. She saw art in everything, and her passion for experimentation led her to delve into a wide variety of media, from painting and sculpture to installation, cinema, and performance. Regardless of her chosen art form, she always succeeded in communicating her positive energy and receptivity. A master at imbuing life into the most standardized of settings, Pape has become known as an artist whose wealth of ideas revolutionized Brazilian art in the 20th century.