Magali Lara
galleries 1, 2 & 3
Five Decades in Spiral
As if following an endless spiral, this exhibition presents itself as a reverse retrospective of Magali Lara’s work, from two murals created especially for the MUAC to her first drawings from the 80’s and 70’s. Five Decades in Spiral thus reviews Lara’s artistic and spatial experiments over the course of her career and the ways in which she creates a formal and plastic yet affective sense of place, a territory of one’s own.
As a feminist artist, Lara’s work offers images and narratives that speak to reciprocity between beings and feelings, conditions and emotions, sentiments and material expressions through an intimate gesture captured in a dialogue between objects, lines and pigments. While she participated in the collective artistic practices of the 70’s, her production has instead been focused on the creation of her own visual language, which can be seen in the value placed on the expressivity of her lines, the way she introduces writing into the representation of spaces and objects and the forms of her vegetable and corporeal allusions that delicately and playfully explore the erotic and existential circumstances of contemporary women.
The exhibition’s different spaces negotiate between the media, forms and colors that Lara uses to experiment and transgress plastic and conceptual limitations. Rather than a mere exercise of shifting between supports, she interweaves the expressive possibilities of each format and its tactile qualities: from the subtlety and linearity of drawings to the density and brushwork of painting, without forgetting the heaviness of tapestry, the sequentiality and composition of artist’s books, the immediatism and interventions of photography and photostats, the finish of ceramics or the narration of animations with the screen as their canvas, in which sound plays the leading role.
Ever since the beginning of her career, Lara has been interested in the notion of the opposite space, that remnant concealed through absence. Her work has questioned the meaning of the white of the canvas or paper and our ways of denoting the pauses and imperceptible silences between brushstrokes and gestures, as well as the miniscule gaps between words and images. Her artistic creations thus constitute an exploration of an endless place drawn out into a spiral, sketching a negative trace that opens up and expands toward other narratives.
Artist: Magali Lara (Mexico City, 1956)
Curation: Virginia Roy Luzarraga, Cuauhtémoc Medina
Publicación
Publication
Magali Lara. Five Decades in Spiral
Authors : Virginia Roy, Maggie Borowitz, Magali Lara, Cuauhtémoc Medina
Language : Spanish & English
Editor: MUAC, UNAM / RM
Price: $400
