Lygia Pape’s “Sendo”

Stepping into the gallery from the lively streets of Barra Funda, you first see the hard lines of Lygia Pape’s polished steel sculpture KV 256 – Prateado (1961/98) offset by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s delicate arrangement of fern branches. This cleverly staged encounter not only illuminates Pape’s enduring influence on a younger generation of artists for whom she remains a lodestar, but encapsulates some of the dynamic tensions—between nature and artifice, senses and intellect, material and immaterial, wild life and implacable form—that animate this lively and remarkably rich survey of her work.1

Pape’s work does not reconcile opposites like the above, in the sense of resolving their contradictions, so much as dismiss the idea that they should be opposed in the first place. Take her series of “Tecelares” woodcuts made in the late 1950s. Then as now, woodcuts were associated with hectoring Stalinist realism, overwrought romantic Expressionism, and the handicraft traditions of folk art. Which is to say, everything that was anathema to a Brazilian avant-garde committed to rationalist European modernisms scattered by war and repression. But Pape’s work cannot be defined negatively, by opposition, and the work in this show resists the logic of either/or (either reason or feeling, either science or poetry) in favor of and/and.

In their energetic arrangement of regular shapes, the “Tecelares” clearly belong to the lineage of De Stijl and Constructivism. Yet they are made hypnotizing by the irregular white lines that weave through the printed circles and squares, and which attest to the growth of the wood that impressed the ink onto the paper. By these disarmingly simple means, Pape connects Euclidean forms to emergent natural shapes, as determined in this case by a tree’s exposure to varying degrees of water and light over its lifetime. The precise geometries are run through with wild patterns, like knotweed breaking through the asphalt of a car park.   

This corruption of ideal forms is only the first of Pape’s transgressions. The woodcuts are equally indebted to Oswaldo Goeldi, whose gritty vignettes of Brazilian street life could hardly seem more removed from the immaculate transcendentalism of Piet Mondrian or Josef Albers. Pape took from Goeldi the convictions that material should not be subordinated to form and that art can participate in social and material realities without sacrificing its autonomy. Here is a first glimpse of Pape’s model for a relationship between the free individual and the collective, and these beguiling woodcuts present, in embryo, the recurring themes of a restless career.

They also encapsulate the principles of the breakaway “neo-Concrete” movement established shortly afterwards by Pape, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and other artists seeking solidarity in nonconformity. Their 1959 manifesto (written, indicatively, by a poet) signals a move away from what they identified as the lifeless rationalism of the “Concretism” that dominated the Brazilian strain of modernism. Instead of a “machine” employed to illustrate predetermined ideas, the work of art was a “quasi-corpus” that could not be broken down into its constituent parts. Like a body, it ceases to work when you pull it apart. No amount of anatomy classes, after all, can teach you what it feels like to be alive.

This leads us to Pape’s Roda dos prazeres - 16 (Wheel of pleasures – 16, 1968), a ring of porcelain bowls filled with green, blue, yellow, and red liquid and laid out on the concrete floor like an unusually colorful summoning circle. Its sickly smell has encouraged at least one mosquito to participate in the installation by drowning in it. I use a pipette to drip some of the blue solution onto my tongue: against my acrid expectations, it tastes like sugar water. I test the other drinks, the different taste of each modulating its neighbors like colors on a wheel. Six decades after it was conceived, the economy by which this work demonstrates how every experience (of art, of life) is a collage of unique, inseparable, and unrepeatable impressions, makes so much contemporary “immersive” work seem shallow and bombastic. At least, I console myself, the mosquito died a happy death.

Roda dos prazeres recuperates into art some elements that have historically been excluded from it (at least in the western tradition): smell and taste, of course, but also time. While you can register the work visually as a snapshot (as in the photograph that accompanies this text), fully to experience it requires that you walk around the sixteen bowls, literally incorporating their contents and using memory to coordinate tastes and colors. The work is the whole of this ritual, which plays out over time, and cannot be reduced to any part of it. This foundational principle also helps us to understand Pape’s paintings and sculptures. 

Take the “Book of Time” series, represented in the Barra Funda gallery by three painted wooden sculptures on a Constructivist plinth. Each of these sculpted “pages” expresses the same protocol: regular shapes are cut from a square panel and then attached in relief to its surface. This transformation of a two-dimensional support into a three-dimensional sculpture prepares us for the fourth dimension of the title: as the reader of a book carries its meaning across the pages, so “The Book of Time” is a story told in installments. That there are 365 of these variously jaunty and somber symbols in total suggests that they might collectively be understood as a diary or daybook. Here is another of Pape’s trademark transgressions: for all the formal affinities with Minimalism, these works pay no mind to that movement’s overweening materialism and hectoring literalism (there is no sense here that “what you see is what you see,” in Frank Stella’s especially grating formulation). They make no attempt to constrain interpretation, catalyzing the imagination rather than shutting it down.

This is in part because Pape does not locate single meanings in discrete things but in the way we put them together. The way we join one “page” to the next; the connection between the work of art and its perceiver; the way a material presents to the eye and the tongue. Anyone who has taken a drawing class will remember the instruction to attend to the spaces between things as much as the lines that define them. The idea that a work of art exists in that space is taken to, and considerably beyond, its logical conclusion in Pape’s lyrical and enigmatic series of “Ttéia” installations. Configured in a dim and mercifully cool room at Casa Iramaia, Ttéia 1, B (2000) is a glittering web of golden threads stretched taut as piano wire between fixtures arranged in perfect circles on perpendicular walls.

Because the lines catch the light at different angles, you need to walk around this network of shimmering tunnels in order to construct, by accumulated perspectives in your mind’s eye, a complete impression of it. Like Roda dos prazeres, the piece cannot be reduced to any isolated perception of it, and by these means Pape inverts Cubism’s methods in order to advance its most important insight. Where the Cubists collapsed space and time onto a flat surface in order to illustrate that unified perspective was a convenient fiction, Pape explodes the work outwards. No single moment or viewpoint is privileged, and the work requires the perceiver to stitch a number of them together in their own imagination. Everything that falls within the time and space of my experience of the work of art is thus drawn into it, ranging from drowned mosquitos to the electric fence that runs around the perimeter walls of Casa Iramaia, making an unsettling formal rhyme with Pape’s installation.

This idea finds its most elegant expression in the hang of two late “Pinturas” paintings on a strip of white wall flanked by sliding plate glass windows opened to admit a breeze into the Barra Funda gallery. These monochrome geometric compositions (some off-white passages textured by marble powder mixed into the paint) are each divided along the horizontal by a single ivory chevron: one pointing upwards, one down. The hard geometry of these paintings is softened by the lush vegetation visible through the windows on either side of them in the gallery, recapitulating the contrast with Mangrané’s found sculpture that opened the show. On the far side of the room, a grid of Pape’s wall-mounted “Amazoninos” sculptures spring off the walls like a forest of abstract symbols and deeply felt homage to the Brazilian landscape. Pape’s work survives not only because it participates in a living artistic tradition, but because it is so radically open to the world that surrounds and constructs it.

Lygia Pape’s “Sendo” is on view at Mendes Wood DM’s Barra Funda gallery through August 1, 2026, and at its Casa Iramaia location through August 8.