In a review of the Lygia Clark retrospective organised by the Fundació Antoni Tapiès, Barcelona in 1997, the art historian Yve-Alain Bois wrote that he knew of no other artist whose oeuvre a curator would find more difficult to present. ¹

Curatorial involvement with Clark's work - a poetic dismantling of the object - was never a case of straightforward display of the artistic corpus. From the early 1960s on, Clark located her practice at the edge of art, considering her 'propositions' as dialogic works to be experienced physically. Amongst other pieces, these are the handcuff-like Moebius strips and the sensorial masks - works that came to take on seminal status within contemporary art, thanks largely to the Tapiès exhibition and Clark's inclusion in documenta X, also in 1997. However, the difficulties inherent in presenting Clark's work apply in particular to her last project, Estruturação do Self (Structuring the Self), which she undertook towards the end of her life, and worked on between 1976 and 1988. From a curatorial point of view, Bois threw down the gauntlet, pondering that 'perhaps documentation is all one can present concerning this last phase of her work - and even then the dilemma is not entirely resolved'. ²

Taking up the challenge, and pushing the curatorial involvement one step further still, Suely Rolnik - psychoanalyst, cultural critic and both friend and collaborator of Clark's - proposed a different way of accessing the artist's work in an exhibition she organised at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (2005) and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2006), under the title 'Lygia Clark: de l'oeuvre á l'événement'