With this exhibition, the Art Institute of Chicago wants to celebrate the career of Lygia Pape (1927–2004), the Brazilian artist who most developed contemporary art in Brazil. This has been demonstrated by her work which crosses multiple languages and media, including painting, performance, printmaking and sculpture.

She was born on April 7, 1927 in Nova Friburgo, Brazil. Her artistic passion began with informal training in fine arts, later Pape studied at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. Her mature work came in the 1950s and 1960s.
She joined the Concrete movement but then, together with fellow Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, she co-founded the Neo-Concrete movement which championed art whose forms were expressive, organic and experiential.
This exhibition brings together nearly 100 of Pape's rarely seen woodblock prints, so rare that some of these have not been seen publicly since the artist exhibited them in the 1950s and 1960s. The title is “Tecelar”, a fancy term that loosely translates to “weaving” and which primarily alludes to the artist's unique, artisanal approach to printmaking and which undergoes influence of the other international modernists. Although the work was created between 1952 and 1960, the title was only applied in the 1970s, once Lygia Pape understood the importance of her own work.

These prints involve the composition of multiple overlapping geometric and linear elements, which they may recall the clash of atomic particles, rudimentary city plans or slides of microscopic samples. To further demonstrate the centrality of the theme of materiality and stratification in the artist's career, the exhibition includes one of Pape's sculptures, Ttéia, arrangements of metal wire or string that create brilliant and ephemeral environments that give the impression of vibrating.
The Art Institute of Chicago believes that Pape's woodblock prints have not yet received the focused attention they deserve and with this exhibition wants to allow people to explore her works in depth, citing the museum “revealing new insights into her process, and examining the ways in which she used them to embody her core ideas about art”.
In this regard, the museum recalls this phrase of the artist:
“My concern is always invention. I always want to invent a new language that’s different for me and for others, too… I want to discover new things. Because, to me, art is a way of knowing the world… to see how the world is… of getting to know the world.”


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