A hundred years ago, the Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade made a memorable proposal on the subject of cultural appropriation and how to defend oneself against it.
In his "Anthropophagic Manifesto" he recommended cannibalism as a method of self-assertion against colonial occupation: Eat what eats you!
A threatened culture may in turn assimilate and digest the culture of its adversary, rather than merely rejecting it.
The maxim found resonance, also among the painters of strict abstraction in the Grupo Frente in Rio de Janeiro.
This front group of the avant-garde was founded in 1954;
its members Lygia Clark,
Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape devoured role models from the Dutch De Stijl movement around Piet Mondrian to post-war concrete artists like Max Bill in order to establish their own modernism.
The retrospective of Lygia Pape in the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection in Düsseldorf makes this clear. It is the first monographic show in Germany of the artist, who was born in 1927 and died in 2004, and which logically follows on from previous exhibitions of abstract art on Carmen Herrera or Charlotte Posenenske.
She built a "Book of Time" out of blocks
Certainly, concrete art was once more popular than it is today, and with it a canon of forms that, as it has been praised for decades, only stands for itself, even means itself, i.e. appears completely autonomously.
For Pape, geometric abstraction initially meant a rejection of figurative conservatism.
Whatever surprise and irritation the pure, clearly contoured, often serial form holds in store when you just look at it, the autodidact pointed out in her early work by letting the picture project into the room as a relief with small blocks.
The view does not find a firm footing on the surface, it becomes blurred in a subtle disorientation of the view.
With the purity of the right angle and the colors red, yellow and blue, Mondrian wanted to banish coincidence from the picture,
that incommensurable that shapes our existence.
Pape, on the other hand, set out to capture that contingency, as in 1961 in a colorful, shimmering “Book of Time” on a giant wall with 365 small picture reliefs that stand for the days of the year.
It's worth a try, but the black-and-white woodcuts in which Pape designs crooked, sharp-edged structures are more convincing, even captivating.
Not only does she print striped patterns on the rice paper, which inevitably bring to mind Frank Stella's later, groundbreaking "Black Paintings" - Pape activates the grain of the printing block as a graphic element and thus in her own way the differentiation of existence: that of point and axis mirrored "Tecelares" (weaves) are the highlight of the exhibition.
Later, Pape will stretch out the lines of these sheets as silver threads in black chambers and, staged theatrically and sacrally with spotlights, thus drawing dashingly in space,
When the military putsch in Brazil in 1964, however, abstraction alone can no longer represent an adequate reaction.
Lygia Pape decidedly expanded her repertoire – entirely in the spirit of the contemporary art of the time – and came up with her own aesthetic solutions for different ideas.
Discover video and performance to go into public space.
In 1967, on the beach at Barra de Tijuca in Rio, she allows herself to be filmed escaping from a white cube, a “square egg” as she calls it, puncturing a membrane and being symbolically reborn.
In the political predicament, this reflects more of a longing, but for her personally it also symbolizes the exit from neo-concretism and the white cube.
She slips a large white cloth with circular cut-outs over a group of children,
On the fringes of the carnival, Pape films the junta mingling with the crowd.
Lines up postcard motifs of the indigenous population, intended to give tourists an exotic flair;
creates a sculptural monument to the Sandinistas in the newly founded Galerie des Arts, after they had just overthrown the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua in 1979: Pape calls the barricade made of plastic bags and rubber balls, which is effectively illuminated from the inside with red light, “wind eggs”. there must be a bit of irony.
After all, as an architecture lecturer, she visits the favelas with her students to discuss the inventiveness that has been tried and tested here.
The show describes an artistic life that begins seemingly orthodoxly, then gradually opens up and takes all the liberties that contemporary art opened up in the sixties to confront an aggressive reality.
The means of abstraction are also good, as can be seen if they are thought through intelligently.
Lygia Pape. The Skin of All.
North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection, Düsseldorf;
until July 17th.
Catalog (Verlag Hatje Cantz) in preparation.