Unity No. 1 (Unidade No. 1)

Lygia Clark was a founding member of the Brazilian Neo-Concrete movement, which pioneered modes of geometric abstract art that upset the usual relationship between artwork and observer and challenged traditional dualities between surface and edge or composition and support. These paintings, from a series of seven, demonstrate Clark's move away from abstraction that relied on a stable relationship between figure and ground (seen in the work of Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich, on view upstairs). She later wrote that her works were neither . .. a 'machine' nor an 'object' but rather an almost-body, which is to say, a being whose reality is not exhausted in the ... relationships between its elements.