" Maria Lai: Woven Writing " is the first retrospective exhibition of the artist from Ulassai to be presented in Spain , at the Es Baluard Museum in Majorca which houses around a hundred works on display from Thursday 11 May until 3 September next .
An exhibition that reconstructs the professional career of one of the most interesting figures in European art of the twentieth century .
Paintings, sculptures, looms, stitched books, performances in open and closed spaces codify the work of this extraordinary artist, who died in Cardedu in 2013. Elements of a land where ancient granite and limestone pinnacles emerge from the sea, rising above the skies of Ogliastra, becoming the essence of the work: chromatic algorithms that range, free without borders crossing geographies.
Earth, stones and sea are the plot of the journey of a lifetime , of an intimate and deeply identifying bond with the place of the 'I' that transpires from the works and that Es Baluard celebrates in this project curated by Imma Prieto, director of the Mallorcan Museum , and Maria Alicata, co-director. «Maria Lai embarked on a lasting and unique creative journey that explored the potential of thread, understood as an autobiographical trace, as a metaphor for her artistic practice» writes Prieto in the preface of the catalogue. And again: «The artist captures the essence of local traditions and reinvents them to bring to light the relationship between humanity and nature, between personal identity and collective ritual, his gestures which respond, to some extent, to his interest in social actions and collaboration, as evidenced by the homage to Antonio Gramsci».
«The project - tell the curators of the exhibition - is based on three main ideas: writing (textual and visual), memory and community. Paintings, sculptures, looms, sewn canvases, books contain the strength of a thought, works that feed on each other, based on personal, local and universal history. Each series shows a continuity and an internal logic that intertwine the different phases of the artist's life».
One hundred and ten works on display including photographs portraying the artist, the sets of the theatrical show "The tree of bitter honey", the stitched books from the Maria Lai Archive for which her niece Maria Sofia is in charge.
Sewing and embroidery, therefore with canvases, represent a sort of passport to freedom, an open space where women can recreate their own history and evolution.
