12th May 2023
Es Baluard Museu d’Art Contemporani de Palma presents “Maria Lai. Woven Writing“, the first retrospective exhibition of the Italian artist Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 – Cardedu, 2013) in Spain, which reconstructs the career of one of the most important figures of art in the second half of the 20th century in Europe.
The project, curated by Imma Prieto and Maria Alicata, opens to the public on Thursday May 11th at 7 p.m. and can be visited in Es Baluard Museu’s Exhibition Hall A from May 12th until September 3rd 2023. On the other hand, the Museum organises an exclusive visit for Friends of Es Baluard with the curators on May 11th at 6 pm.
“Woven Writing” is based on three main ideas: writing (textual and visual), memory and community and, as the title indicates, the exhibition points to the connection that is established between writing and sewing, both as intimate gestures that expose ideas and create new universes on the blank page or fabric.
Through paintings, sculptures, looms, sewn canvases, books, maps, actions in the public space, the artist unfolded a whole universe and a language of her own that connects in an intimate way with a Mediterranean landscape that responds to specific codes and frequencies: the heart of Sardinia, in a village of Ogliastra, located between stone mountains and the sea.
In this way, thread and fabrics articulate an own language which, in its context and as an artistic expression, was original and totally ahead of its time. In addition, the artist incorporates in her work a strong commitment to communality, gestures that respond, in a certain way, to an interest in the social and collaborative fact, involving her neighbours and fellow citizens in her performances or actions in the public space, understanding art as a pedagogical tool for social transformation.
In addition, both the exhibition and Maria Lai’s work incorporate a feminist reading, linking space and textiles, extolling the spaces rooted in women. It also recovers traditional stories and ancestral fables related to the Sardinian imaginary, appealing to popular customs and iconography, using, for example, symbols present in the history of the Sardinian people, such as stones and bread.
Imma Prieto, director of Es Baluard Museu and co-curator of the exhibition, explains that “Maria Lai understands the act of sewing as someone who writes, as someone who records her own biography and thus sculpts some statements, but always from the gesture of the sinking needle. They are sewn ideas, piercing the fabrics that serve as an infinite page. Memory and life are threaded, but, above all, knowledge, seeking a way to bring us closer to one of her utopias: social equality. Maria Lai creates a space where people inhabit a place originating from free, perhaps undisciplined thought. Lai builds new territories, founds borderless lands from multiple dichotomies. These paradoxes are perhaps contradictions that dissolve in her work and point to the union of the finite with the infinite, as she writes in one of her canvases for theatrical scenographies: L’immenso s’imbarca nell’isola (The immense embarks on the island)”.
Maria Alicata, co-curator of the exhibition adds “Writing suggested to me a relationship between ink and thread and the possibility of giving substance to an abstract fact“. We could say that the itinerary of the exhibition unfolds from this sentence by Maria Lai, a thematic digression that allows us to reconstruct the research of a highly innovative artist. From the first drawings of the 1950s, through the looms, the sewn books, to the work of relational art “Legarsi alla montagna” of 1981, which closes the exhibition itinerary, Maria Lai’s entire research has been a work of connections and textures that continue to involve us. As she herself said: “This is what art should do: make us feel more united“.
The project is supported by the Archivio Maria Lai.
Fila que fila… històries i jocs
On the occasion of International Museum Day and based on the exhibition “Maria Lai. Woven Writing”, the museum’s Education Department is organising a day of activities for families with children aged 3 and over, which will take place on Saturday 20 May 2023 from 10.30 am to 1.30 pm.
The programme includes a storytelling session led by the actress Lluki Portas in which she will read some of Maria Lai’s original books that form part of the exhibition. At the same time, the museum’s courtyard will host classic games such as dominoes, tic-tac-toe and the sack race, among others, and there will even be a large-scale reproduction of “the game of the Flight of the Goose” designed by Maria Lai.
