Extract from "Lygia Clark: Estudos E Maquette" exhibition press release, 2010:

The earliest works in the exhibition, a series of works on paper in the Concretist tradition, illustrate the indebtedness of Clark’s early practice to the abstract traditions of Modernism that had come to be assimilated into Brazilian culture in the 1940s. Lygia Clark began making art in 1947, and the early drawings and gouaches reveal a growing confidence and the beginnings of her interrogation of geometric abstraction as a viable, meaningful aesthetic. Two graphite and gouache works from 1952, from the Planos em Superficie Modulada (Modulated Surface Planes) series, represent the artist’s original investigations into the interplay between line and colour in the construction of pictorial space, yet as this series progressed the works became bolder, simpler and more radical in their composition.

The later wall-based works, beginning with the 1954 unique collage Quebra da Moldura (Breaking the Frame), evince a growing dissatisfaction with the conventions of Concretism, the heir to European neo-plasticism, with the inviolate flatness and containment of the work that this tradition entailed. Clark’s frustration grew as the Planos em Superficie Modulada developed, and by 1958 they had become chromatically starker, often monochrome collages of card and wood, as Clark became convinced that optical ingenuity was not enough to bridge the gulf between artwork and viewer that she had come to believe was imperative. Finally in 1959 Clark felt she had reached the limits of classical geometric abstraction as she entered a new, vital phase of her career. As she wrote in 1960, ‘the plane arbitrarily marks off the limits of a space, giving humanity an entirely false and rational idea of its own reality. From this are derived the opposing concepts of high and low, front and back – exactly what contributes to the destruction in humankind of the feeling of wholeness…The square took on a magical meaning when the artist understood it as carrying a total vision of the universe. But the plane is dead.’ "