Pushing the very edge of what art could be in 1964—and indeed in 2021—Lygia Clark produced the Estruturas de caixas: a central series acknowledged as her last sculptural objects. However decisive in their origin, Guy Brett conceived these works as ‘the beginning of things’ (Brett, letter to Lygia Clark, December 11, 1967)—an opinion shared by Lygia herself who wrote back in full agreement on January 19, 1968. Brett’s reading was informed by firsthand experience of these matchboxes, having viewed Clark’s retrospective exhibition at Signals London in 1965, where they were shown alongside earlier work including the Bichos.

These modest works are constructed, as their name would suggest, only of matchboxes, glue, and gouache. Their apparent simplicity is reminiscent of childsplay, and yet they are both fiercely compulsive and slightly absurd—in the words of Lygia Clark, “a terrible presumption.” However, like the Bichos that preceded them, these insular matchboxes were meant to be handled, touched, and experienced physically. To push these tiny drawers in and out, to feel your fingers slide as they create or eliminate space, to view them from diverse vantage points and fulfill their powerfully experimental nature is to embody the sense of the moment.

At least conceptually, Clark’s Estruturas de caixas intersect with Hélio Oiticica’s series of Box Bolides , also executed during the critical years of 1964-1965. As noted by Bryony Fer in the catalogue of Clark’s 2014 exhibition Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948-1988 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Oiticica’s Bolides prioritize chromatic experimentation while Clark emphasizes a deep commitment to the organic line as an articulation device like a fold or hinge.

The Estruturas de caixas have been described as both independent modular units and as readymades. They exist in a variety of permutations, with differing configurations of elements, generally painted in monochromatic red, black, white, blue, gold or silver. These otherwise inconsequential objects convey at their core a process of invention and transformation, a never-ending proposition of making and unmaking through constantly mutable variants.