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closed Holding the sun by the hand.

The show

The great exhibition that the MAXXI National Museum of 21st Century Arts is dedicating to Maria Lai (1919 - 2013), one of the most singular voices of contemporary Italian art, is entitled "Holding the sun by the hand". Artist with an extraordinary generative capacity, in advance of artistic research that will be developed only later, Lai was able to create a different and original language, while aware of the long decanting process that his art would have to go through to be recognized. Today that process seems to have taken place.
“In 2019 - indicates Giovanna Melandri, President of the MAXXI Foundation - we chose to pay particular attention to female artistic visions and, therefore, a project linked to Maria Lai could not be missing. With this exhibition, in fact, we pay a tribute to the figure and work of a woman who has been able to interpret infinite languages during her artistic career, but always in the wake of her research: to represent and reinvent traditions and symbols of an archaic, eternal culture and to address our contemporaries with strength and immediacy ”.
The retrospective at MAXXI focuses on what is defined as his second period , that is, on the works that the artist creates since the 1960s and which he starts exhibiting again, after a long absence from the public and artistic scene, only in 1971. The exhibition, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Luigia Lonardelli, is organized in collaboration with the Maria Lai Archive and the Stazione dell'Arte Foundation, with the patronage of the Municipality of Ulassai and the support of the Fondazione di Sardegna. More than 200 works on display, including Sewn books, sculptures, Geographies, public works and her famous Looms, to tell the personality of Maria Lai and the different aspects of her work in the most complete way possible. Also on display are some works that have recently become part of the MAXXI Collection: Terra , 1984; The astral traveler , 1989; Whispers , 1996; Pagina sewed, 1978 and Untitled, 2009, a rare Geography on acetate currently being donated. The exhibition "Tenendo per mano il sole" is the title of the exhibition and of the first Stitched Fairy Tale. Both in the title and in the work there are many of the typical elements of Lai's research: his interest in poetry, language and words; the cosmogony of its geographies evoked by the sun; the pedagogical vocation of "holding hands".
Not a classic retrospective, but rather a story that does not adhere to purely chronological constraints and follows a peculiar biographical and artistic path, characterized by speeches and intuitions apparently left in abeyance to then be resumed many years later. Through a wide selection of works, mostly unpublished, the exhibition presents the multifaceted world of Maria Lai and the dense stratification of ideas and suggestions that characterized her imagination.
The path winds through five sections , which take their name from citations or titles of Lai's works, while the subtitle describes the typical methods of his research; each section is accompanied by the voice of Maria Lai through a montage of unpublished materials created by the director Francesco Casu. There is also a last, ideal, section, which documents the works of environmental art created in the territory and in particular in Ogliastra. The Being section is weaving. Sewing and stitching documents the first tests carried out in the 1960s, a decade in which he decided to abandon the graphic and pictorial technique to devote himself to experimenting with materials. This is how the first Looms and Sewn Canvas were born: functional everyday objects, linked to Sardinian craftsmanship, are deprived of their practical function to be transformed into works that demonstrate a fervent expressive research. The thread also represents an idea of transmission and communication, Lai sees art as a tool and language capable of modifying our reading of the world, an attitude that derives from her personal history as a teacher and which will later manifest itself in the Books. and in the Stitched Fairy Tales. Art is the game of adults. Playing and Talking collects the art games created by Lai, reinterpretations of traditional games with which he reaffirms the founding role of creation in society. Play as a means to know oneself and to learn to relate to others, an activity not to be relegated to the world of childhood, but to continue to be cultivated in adulthood. The Landscape Object section. Disseminating and sharing , tells the relational aspect of Lai's practice through a large corpus of objects linked to his emotional universe, including sculptures that simulate the appearance of a book or single pages, forms that recall everyday artifacts, claiming however its own unprecedented individuality. The astral traveler. Imagining Elsewhere collects the series of Geographies, visionary and fantastic astral maps that outline constellations, chimeras and infinite imaginary universes. The happy season of participatory works is finally the protagonist of the section Art takes us by the hand . Meet and Participate . Come Binding to the Mountain (1981), considered the first episode of relational art in Italy, an intervention inspired by an ancient legend, with which Maria Lai manages to involve the entire population of the town of Ulassai. The profound conviction of the saving power of art, the theme of the game considered fundamental for the growth of ideals for the community, art as a tool, capable of bringing together, imagining, relating: this, and more, makes Maria Lai is one of the most innovative artists of her generation, who was able to intercept and interpret at the dawn of the cultural mechanisms underlying today's society.

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