In his new series of works Untitled (Bichos) (2024), Kasper Akhøj documents the weekly conservation protocol for Lygia Clark’s Bichos––also known as Critters––a series of hinged, unstable sculptures created in aluminum by the Brazilian artist beginning in 1959. Untitled (Bichos) includes a series of analogue, black and white photographs, hand printed by the artist, taken over the summer of 2024 in the conservation laboratories of Pinacoteca de São Paulo, where Clark’s Bichos were on show in the exhibition Lygia Clark: Project for a Planet.
With Untitled (Bichos), Akhøj continues his practice of complicating the history and theory of mid-twentieth century modernism by documenting the processes of preservation, displacement, replication and alteration through which works of art, architecture and design are transmitted over time.
In Welcome (To The Teknival) (2008-2017), Akhøj traced the transformation of the villa E.1027 by architect Eileen Gray over a nine year period as it undergoes comprehensive conservation work, including the removal of graffiti and the restoration of murals painted on the white walls of Gray’s building by Le Corbusier. Yet, whereas previous works, such as Welcome (To The Teknival), revolve around themes of replication and authorship, Untitled (Bichos) focuses on the use of things as an object in itself.
The Bichos mark a moment in Clark’s career when she had abandoned conventional forms of painting and sculpture turning instead to an art of participation. Intended to be handled and manipulated by exhibition goers, the Bichos prepare the evolution of Clark’s practice, after her move to Paris in the 1970s, into a form of psychotherapy centered on group interactions and the use of relational objects.
In Untitled (Bichos) Akhøj contraposes the reparatory process that the sculptures may or may not have been intended for with the maintenance work on the sculptures themselves that is necessitated by their constant handling while on display. Thus, the work brings to our attention the ways in which the functions of collection, conservation, and display are negotiated in modern art museums as well as how those negotiations often boil down to a distribution of care.
In the gallery’s adjacent space, Akhøj presents Abstracta (2007–), a slide projection documenting his research on the socio-economic and political history of the display system by the same name. Abstracta was conceived by the Danish designer Poul Cadovius (1911–2011) for the 1960 International fair in Brussels as a modular system that could be expanded almost infinitely. While only moderately successful in the West, unlicensed versions of Abstracta unknown to its designer, were produced in China and later found a market in Yugoslavia where they became ubiquitous across retail and public institutions over a 30-year period beginning in the 1970s. While Abstracta’s modularity and reproducibility may have appealed to either socialist economic principles or the communist imaginary, or both, the patent for Abstracta has since been purchased by an American corporation thus inaugurating a new chapter in the history of the system.