Kinky may not be the first word that comes to mind when describing the art of Lygia Clark (1920–88), the latest subject in the Neue Nationalgalerie’s recent efforts to address its historical under-representation of women artists, which saw retrospectives of Yoko Ono, Nan Goldin, and Isa Genzken (as well as the first Brazilian honored here by a major retrospective). While Clark’s elegant black-and-white portraits don’t promise titillation, nor do the first few galleries tracing her early, tonally subdued Constructivist paintings and interactive sculptures, a corporeal and psychic boldness emerges in her performance works – an eerily canny mirror for a city with such a vibrant sex-club scene.

The challenge of imparting tactility in art is clearest in her metal sculptures, the so-called bichos (critters). Clark envisioned them as dynamic objects activated through play. Ordinarily displayed by museums in glass vitrines, leaving them untouchable, impossible to awake, this exhibition features commissioned replicas. In areas marked by burgundy carpets, their jagged parts can be unfolded, or collapsed to a flat plane, like a painting’s – blurring the distinction between forms. Artists like Clark, who signed the 1958 Neo-Concrete Manifesto, saw this fluidity as essential to overcoming the geometric abstraction she espoused as part of Rio de Janeiro’s Grupo Frente. Eventually deeming its rationalism too rigid, the Neo-Concrete artists called instead for immersive, intuitive, bodily experience. Even the name Clark gave these sculptures was to evoke organicity.

Photos: David von Becker

Views of Lygia Clark, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2025

Tactility is the order of the day here, with roughly half the exhibition comprising interactive pieces. There are plastic bags, pouches, and gloves containing textures squashable, crunchy, or surprisingly hard. One furry glove recalls Meret Oppenheim’s Surrealist masterpiece Breakfast in Fur (1936); indeed, Clark’s art borrows from a similar spring of the unconscious, with results by turns startling, transfixing, even scary. Consider Tunnel (1968), a fifty-meter-long, stocking-like fabric piece. I watched one visitor writhe inside it, after another had scrambled out gasping for air. Its claustrophobia recalled a BDSM short that played during the Pornfilmfestival Berlin in 2024, in which a woman is zipped head-to-toe into a vacuum bag. In both, the body is not just enveloped, but constricted, the womb-like embrace morphing into the immobilization of surrender.

Lest this comparison seem far-fetched, consider Clark’s Máscaras Sensoriais (Sensory Masks, 1967) – fabric hoods sewn in with pouches with aromatic herbs. In her letters to fellow artist Hélio Oiticica, Clark envisioned participants being molded by them, becoming an “authentic bicho,” which meant experiencing themselves as objects to “embrace [their] eroticism.” Psychotherapist Douglas Thomas has written about erotic release through objectification in kink scenes, whose participants are stripped of ego and confronted with their essential thing-ness.

Views of Lygia Clark, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2025

Photos: David von Becker

Clark’s immersive works signal the inextricability of pain from life, and suffering as our eternal Other. Her letters contain violent susurrations: “a mec who deflowered [her] as a child;” her patriarchal father’s abuses; her revolt against sexual repression and desire to unlock it; the intensity of her psychoanalytic treatment in Paris (she mentions constant vomiting). Clark also applies the word “deflower” to her art, seeing it not as merely immersive, but also as capable of invading bodies and psyches. Meanwhile, the visitors “deflower” the art, since one can only partake in their meaning by interacting, even at the risk of destroying them.

Such dichotomies – interior and exterior, integrative and threatening, symbolic and real – also underpin Cannibalism (1969) and Anthropophagic Slobber (1969). In the latter, participants sit in a circle around a person lying prostate on the floor. Slowly, they pull colorful strings from their mouths, piling them on the prone person’s naked chest and legs, until his flesh disappears in the drool-soaked mass. A lookalike digestive track, this spectral act of regurgitation is perhaps what Clark meant while writing, “it’s the phantasma of the body, in fact, that interests me, and not the body itself” – the thread as a kind of abject Ouija-board. Throughout her works, the body haunts the mind, with its anxious, surreptitious drives, its premonition of pain and death, but also its immense, irresolute, all-consuming appetites.

Cabeça Coletiva, 1969. Installation view, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2025. Photo: David von Becker

Máscaras Sensoriais, 1967. Installation view, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2025. Photo: David von Becker

Steeped in the theories of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who believed objects helped patients regulate anxiety, Clark eventually became a therapist herself. Her work can be glimpsed in an inflatable bed, a kind of soft Freud couch, and the video Body Memory (1984), showing her with a patient who has ingested honey, and on whose body she has placed grounding objects, such as seashells and liquid-filled pouches. If it’s hard to judge her methods’ efficacy, it’s clear that Clark believed that the psyche was meant to be awakened not by language, but by touch. There is, of course, a lightness to all this – the safety of knowing it’s “just play.” But Clark followed Winnicott (likewise a touchstone in Thomas’s theories on therapeutic kink) in his conviction that healing starts in this liminal space, partaking of both reality and fantasy. In our present moment, dominated by a discourse of boundaries emotional, corporeal, and sexual, her art dares us to indulge our phantasmic bodies.

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Lygia Clark

Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin
23 May – 12 Oct 2025