Lygia Pape n. 1927, Nova Friburgo, Brazil; d. 2004, Rio de Janeiro

Lygia Pape is best known for her groundbreaking approach to abstraction that sought to integrate art into everyday life. Early on, acclaimed as a visionary printmaker and avant-garde thinker, Pape cofounded the Neo-Concrete movement in the late 1950s, advocating for forms that were expressive, organic, and experiential rather than purely geometric or prescriptive. 

Pape participated in pivotal exhibitions such as Exposição Neoconcreta I & II (1959 – 1960) in Rio de Janeiro and the second Bienal de São Paulo. Her varied methods of abstraction responded to Brazil’s evolving sociopolitical landscape, including the military dictatorship (1964 – 1985). Pape employed angular forms and intersecting lines as means of engaging with the structures around her – from her sensitivity to the grain of wood in her early woodcuts to her Neo-Concrete Ballet (1958) in which geometric shapes were moved by dancers inside them in a precise choreography to making spatial relationships tangible in the participatory performance Divisor [Divider] (1968), where individuals where brought together under a white fabric with openings for their heads.  

Over a career that spanned more than five decades, she fundamentally redefined the boundaries between art and viewer experience. As British art critic Guy Brett forwarded, there is a great insight that Lygia Pape brings us, “that it is not the object which is important but the way it is lived by the spectator.” 

Lygia Pape (b. 1927, Nova Friburgo, Brazil; d. 2004, Rio de Janeiro) 

Pape’s work is the subject of several major forthcoming and recent solo exhibitions, including Weaving Space, Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection, Paris (2025); Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2023); The Skin of ALL, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (2022); Lygia Pape, Fondazione Carriero, Milan (2019); Ttéia 1,C, Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2018); Lygia Pape, Glenstone Foundation, Potomac (2018); and A Multitude of Forms, Metropolitan Museum of Art & Met Breuer, New York (2017). 

Her work has also been included in recent group exhibitions including ABERTO4 | LE CORBUSIER, Maison La Roche, Paris (2025); For Children: Art Stories since 1968, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2025); We Will Go Right Up to the Sun, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen (2024); Some May Work as Symbols, Raven Row, London (2024); Icônes, Punta della Dogana, Venice (2023); Women in Abstraction, Guggenheim Bilbao, Bilbao (2022); and Though it's dark, still I sing, 34th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo (2021), among others.