Lygia Pape

Lygia Pape ranged widely across mediums, challenging formal and conceptual boundaries and becoming a pioneer of Brazilian contemporary art. Claiming, “art is my way of understanding the world,” she worked in painting, printmaking, sculpture, dance, film, performance, and installation, always attempting to merge art and life. Her career began in the 1950s, with her involvement in the Concretist and Neo-Concretist movements, during which she created Op Art compositions driven by geometry and line. She later moved beyond these movements, orchestrating one of her best-known works, Divisor, in 1968, for which she invited people to poke their heads through slits cut into a capacious white sheet and move en masse in a circle. Towards the end of her life, she was crafting vivid installations, which, like all of her work, integrated the aesthetic, ethical, and political with elegance and wit.