Belo Horizonte, MG, 1920 – Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 1988

Critter – Sundial, 1960

anodized aluminum

Collection of Fundação José and Paulina Nemirovsky, on long-term loan to Pinacoteca de São Paulo

Bichos [Critters] is a series of sculptures made by Lygia Clark at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. Their structure of geometric planes, joined by hinges, articulates geometry as a body that can move. However, instead of making references to industry, construction, or automatons of any kind—dreams (or nightmares) shared in Clark’s time—the artist risks giving them a living name, of a living thing, an organic individuality. She then proposes that the public interact with them, manipulating the critters that respond to touch in their own way. They can be docile or resist. In this interaction, the meanings of the work are formulated: there are those who caress and love the critter; there are those who develop a relationship in which one learns from the other; and there are also those who behave violently and force the critter to assume an extreme and uncomfortable form—in this case, the critter breaks. Bicho – Relógio de Sol [Critter – Sundial] is interesting because it reconnects the organic meanings of the Critters with their form as a thing, an object, an instrument of measurement. In this process, there is the suggestion of interaction with the light that indicates the time, but also the proposal that in the relationship between the object and the person it is still possible to know something about time.