Italy

Maria Lai was active in the national and international artistic scene, her language took from different inspiration like “Novecento” sculpture, conceptual and Land Art and Italian Arte Povera; her works are featured in important exhibition on contemporary Italian art, such as Italics. She was educated as an artist, between Rome, where she studied with Marino Mazzacurati and Emilio Prini, and Venice, under the strict guidance of Arturo Martini. Evident talent since her youth, with a shy character, she has exposed in different art exhibitions with wide intervals of time.

Though the sixties were a period of intense collaborations, Maria Lai increasingly distanced herself from artistic circles and a deeper engagement with literary and poetic developments, through her contacts with authors such as Giuseppe Dessì, who played a fundamental part in her formation, enabling her to rediscover the value of the legends and the history of Sardinia. From this period the relationship with the traditions of her land became central to her work, in a conceptual outlook with an anthropological matrix. Together with drawing, her output was enriched with subjects and materials close to an ancient, popular culture as in the case of her sculptures of bread, in itself a plain and perishable product, closely associated with everyday life and women’s work.

From the 1970s the artist has developed an original language in the production of sewn canvas that generate unreadable and material writings that evoke mood and thoughts. The “thread” that Lai extends to the public always carries a story with it. One of the artist’s favorite sources—here introduced by a special thematic section—was the ancient tale of Maria Pietra, the protagonist of Cuoremio, a story by Sardinian writer Salvatore Cambosu, who had been Lai’s schoolteacher, that stands for the archetype of art’s magic healing powers. Literature and especially poetry, the alternating rhythms of words and silences, full and empty spaces, spoken and written words, form the well from which Lai drew her inspiration.

During the seventies the artist also created a series of works central to the development of her artistic language, which she called Telai (“Looms”), works that combined painting and sculpture and in which the age-old tradition of weaving was opened up to new compositional possibilities. The very structure of the loom, the yarn and the arrangement of the warp and weft were all elements that the artist interpreted and elaborated with absolute freedom of composition, so evoking the intimacy and the daily care in a world of female gestures, and producing works that blend abstraction and landscape, color and material, gesture and composition.\

As the Telai was three-dimensional works they abandoned the dimension of painting, as in the case of Sewing Up the World from 2008, the work in the collection of the Madre. In this, as in other works, the technique and the instruments of weaving are transformed into a formal language that creates a close dialogue with the achievements of artists such as Anni Albers, Louise Bourgeois and Greta Bratescu.

After her “Geographies” series which is organized around large compositions made with fabrics and embroideries that represent the planets, constellations and imaginary geographies, Lai kept working on new series of “Looms”, “Sheets” and “Books” which the artist produced in the late 1970s. In the former the story is while the “Books” are among the artist’s best-known creations. And in 1978 she introduced her now celebrated Scalp Book at the Venice Biennale. Among them, is also the work The Legend of Sardus Pater from 1990, is one of the most important examples. Here the ties between weaving, embroidery and writing become intense and close, the echo of a relationship that evokes the beginnings of ancient narrative. In all Maria Lai’s work, the gesture of weaving becomes a meditation conducted in solitude, an intimate reflection on the meaning of community, history and tradition, a poetic attempt to recreate a bond between an archaic past and a present in which memory and its transmission appear to have lost their value.