I know of no other artist whose oeuvre a curator could find more difficult to present than that of Lygia Clark (1920–88). Though the Brazilian artist was acclaimed in her own country, she remained marginal in the art world all her life. Her works after 1965 (which she labeled “propositions”) were never meant to be offered for sale; nor were they made to be “shown.” They consist of nothing else but the use by others, according to certain rules determined by the artist, of various easily replicated props—such as a pebble and a plastic bag filled with one’s own warm breath and tied with a

The artist Laurent Pariente’s forays into the field of architecture have been so convincing that he was recently commissioned to design an industrial building on the outskirts of Boulogne-sur-Mer. Yet neither his training nor his early artistic leanings would seem to have destined him to carry out such an architectural project.

Beginning his career primarily as a painter, a desire to create in three dimensions led him to erect (in a gallery space in Bordeaux in 1990) an L-shaped wall covered in red clay. By registering effects of light, material, and color traditionally reserved for painting,