Maria Lai: threads and canvases, weavings overseas

Hsewing dreams, weaving inspirations, binding boundaries, tracing geographies of memories and emotions, creating a magical universe in which every fragment is an act of tenacity and poetry. Eleven years have passed since the disappearance of Maria Lai and his art never ceases to enchant and to speak with the same intensity of the soul and matter, so bewitching and surprising as to lead into a world rich in imagination and visions, of fairy tales and games of freedom. From Sardinia to New York. This is how this artist, considered one of the greatest masters of the art of the 20th centuryarrived overseas for the first retrospective dedicated to her in the United States.

Maria Lai’s art in America

Maria Lai. A Journey to Americaedited by Paola Mura, it is the great exhibition that can be visited until 28 July 2025organized by Magazzino Italian Art, in Cold Spring, near the Big Apple, the only American museum entirely dedicated to contemporary art made in Italy, founded by the pair of visionary collectors made up of the American Nancy Olnick and the Italian of Sardinian origin Giorgio Spanu . Over one hundred works, many unpublished works exhibited for the first time and for the most part never presented in the United States, coming from the museum’s collection and other private collections and prestigious Italian institutions, they trace a path that embraces Lai’s entire production, from the 1950s to the last works of the 2000s.

From Ogliastra to the world

It is a journey in the footsteps of boundless expressiveness that moves between drawings, sculptures and multi-material works, inventions and stories translated into art. From the first paintings that capture Sardinian landscapes to looms, to bread fetuses, to sewn sheets, up to collective and relational art with an in-depth analysis of an angle that has remained almost unexplored: the connection between this great creative and the country with stars and stripes which Maria Lai visited in the late 1960s. Born in 1919 in Ulassai, a small town wedged between the Ogliastra mountains, in Sardinia, Since she was a child, she demonstrated a strong creative propensity.

A woman on the international art scene

It was his father, a veterinarian, who supported his desire to attend an art institute outside the island. Lai, who was part of a generation that gave no space to women in art, defied her time. It was formed between Rome and Venicein the lagoon city she attended, as the only student in her class, sculpture courses at the Academy of Fine Arts held by Arturo Martini who taught her to look for the stories hidden in stone, the essence and breath in forms. In 1957 the first personal exhibition in the Obelisco gallery in Romean exhibition space founded by the journalist Irene Brin and her husband Gaspero Del Corso, opened the doors of the national art scene to her. Animated by a great desire to experiment, Lai pushed herself towards autonomous and independent research that required detachment from the whirlwind of exhibitions and art critics.

The wind of protests distances her from art

For about a decade, he decided not to exhibit his works anymore, but he didn’t stop. She continued to work without ever putting aside the determination that had characterized her. In 1968, a year of protests and youth revolts on a global level, Lai felt the need to immerse himself in the wind of rebellion coming from what was still considered the New World, animated by the great marches for civil rights, by anti-war demonstrations and agitated by feminist ferment. He joined the Sardinian Dau family in Canada, whom he met in Rome, who had moved to Montreal and from there he traveled between Quebec and Ontario and then moved to New York. «Those who knew her in that period describe her as an extremely curious, strong-willed person, very cultured and open to artistic experiments» reports Paola Mura, curator of the exhibition and artistic director of Magazzino Italian Art.

The influence of American pop culture

In love with the poetry of Walt Whitman, connoisseur of the paintings of Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschenberg, Maria Lai arrived in North America bringing with her a series of paintings hoping to exhibit themwithout however finding the right framework. That wish comes true now, fifty-six years later, with seven of those works, from the private Dau collection, on display today for the first time. Important not only because they marked Maria Lai’s transition from realism to abstractionism, but because they anticipated a new phase of his creative paththe one from which the original artistic style that continues to distinguish it was born.

An unconventional art

They are like canvases Stones or Nocturne n.2the latter recalls the lunar landscapes and the great fascination for space that struck the collective imagination in that period. The month-long stay between Canada and the United States left a profound impression on her. It was perhaps during that American stay that Maria Lai began to focus on the idea of an art no longer confined to the traditional limits of painting or sculpture, but unconventional and open to timeless instances capable of communicating with space, people, history and capable of uniting, connecting and building bridges. What made her a globally recognized artist. The references to American culture were intertwined with elements coming from Sardinian traditions and the methods of Arte Povera, becoming part of an expressive heritage that already had a universal heart.

And it is like a return journey a posteriori that winds through works such as the sewn books, composed of specifically indecipherable writings, One thousand four hundred and ninety-two And The Song of the Red Antsthe first created for the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in America, the second inspired by the visual culture rich in feathers and colors of the Native Americans encountered on his itinerary from whom he purchased the ritual masks that influenced some of his works.

Pioneer of relational art

If La Torre recalls the tragic collapse of the Twin Towers in New York on 11 September 2001, the sewn tapestries/sheets from the performance “Essere è Tessere” held in 2008 in Aggius, a town in Sardinia, were accompanied by the verses of the American poet Whitman. «These unique combinations make Maria Lai an extraordinarily current artist in a world in which the fusion of historical traditions, different philosophies and contrasting images is an integral part of our everyday life» states Mura.

Art without brushes but with threads

It was shortly after her American period that Maria Lai exhibited her first frames and works in which she no longer painted with brushes, but with threads and other materials. Then starting from the 80s she arrived at relational art of which she was a pioneer with the operation for which she is perhaps best known: Bonding to the Mountainillustrated in the exhibition by Tonino Casula’s video and with photographs by Pietro Berengo Gardin. Inspired by an ancient Sardinian legend, Lai united the houses of Ulassaihis country of origin, to the nearby mountains across 26 km of blue denim ribbon which calmed ancient resentments and disagreements to outline a new idea of ​​community in the name of art, perceived as catharsis and a symbol of reconciliation.

The return to the roots

The 90s marked, however, the return to the never forgotten roots in Sardinia, without giving up the freedom, self-determination and awareness that have always accompanied it. «His greatest legacy beyond art» according to the supporters of this exhibition, the Olnick Spanu spouses. Tiny in body, giant in spirit, Maria Lai has continued to surprise and innovate, even experimenting in the multimedia fieldcollaborating in fashion with great creatives such as Antonio Marras, expressing every time an art capable of reaching straight to the heart with a language without barriers and limits, understandable to all those who want to know it. As in a journey marked by his words: «Art has a specific task, that of opening consciences. Without this the world dries up.”

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