ROME.- MAXXI, the National Museum of XXI Century Arts is devoting a major exhibition entitled Tenendo per mano il sole to Maria Lai (1919 - 2013), one of the most original voices in Italian contemporary art. An artist with extraordinary generative capacities, ahead of the artistic research of her time, which would catch up only later, she succeeded in creating a different and original language while being aware of the long process of decantation that her art would have to undergo before it achieved recognition. Today that process appears to be complete: over the last few years there have been numerous initiatives devoted to her, and her works have recently been displayed at Documenta 14 and the 2017 edition of the Venice Biennale. In 2019 - states Giovanna Melandri, Fondazione MAXXI President - we chose to focus substantial attention on feminine artistic visions. Therefore, we could not exclude a project on Maria Lai. The exhibition is a tribute to the character and to the work of a woman who has been able to unravel infinite artistic languages throughout her career, always keeping her research at the centre: representing and reinventing - gently and poetically - all the traditions and symbols of an archaic, eternal culture to speak directly and powerfully to the contemporary generations.

The retrospective at MAXXI focuses on what has been defined as her second period, that is to say, the works she created from the 1960s and which she started exhibiting again, following a long absence from the public and the art scene, only in 1971. “This was because”, underlines Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, director of MAXXI Arte, “it was from that time, through to her death in 2013, that many of the aspirations that make her today a very contemporary artist are present in the work of Maria Lai, allowing us to restore her to a central position in the history of recent art.”

The exhibition, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Luigia Lonardelli, has been produced in collaboration with the Archivio Maria Lai and Fondazione Stazione dell’Arte, with the patronage of the Municipality of Ulassai and the support of the Fondazione di Sardegna. More than 200 works are on display, including sewn books, sculptures, Geographies, public works and her celebrated Looms, presenting as comprehensively as possible, the personality of Maria Lai and the diverse aspects of her work. The exhibition also features some works recently added to the MAXXI Collection: Terra, 1984; Il viaggiatore astrale, 1989; Bisbigli, 1996; Pagina cucita, 1978 and Untitled, 2009, a rare Geography on acetate currently being accepted as a donation.

Tenendo per mano il sole is the title of the exhibition and the first Sewn Fable made by the artist. Both the title and the work contain many of the elements typical of Lai’s research: her interest in poetry, language and the word; the cosmogony of her geographies evoked by the sun; the pedagogical vocation implicit in that “taking by the hand”. Not so much a classic retrospective as a story that is not bound by purely chronological constraints and follows a peculiar biographical and artistic path, characterised by discourses and intuitions apparently left suspended before being taken up again many years later.

Through a broad selection of works, many of them previously unseen, the exhibition presents the multifaceted world of Maria Lai and the dense stratification of ideas and suggestions that characterised her imaginary. The show is structured in five sections which take their name from citations or the titles of works by Lai, while the subtitle describes the typical methods of her research; the voice of Maria Lai accompanies each section through a montage of previously unseen material compiled by the director Francesco Casu. There is also a final section documenting the works of environmental art realised by the artist, in particular in the Ogliastra region. The section Essere è tessere. Cucire e ricucire documents the first works produced in the Sixties, a decade in which the artist decided to abandoned painting and drawing techniques to devote herself to experimentation with materials. This led to the first Looms and the Sewn Canvases: functional, quotidian objects associated with Sardinian craftsmanship were stripped of their practical function and transformed into works revealing fervid expressive research. The thread also represents an idea of transmission and communication, Lai saw art as an instrument and a language capable of modifying our reading of the world, an approach that derived from her background as a teacher and which was later manifest in the Sewn Books and Sewn Fables. L’arte è il gioco degli adulti. Giocare e Raccontare brings together the art games created by Lai, re-readings of traditional games with which she reiterates the fundamental role of creativity in society. Play as a means of attaining self-awareness and learning how to relate to the other, an activity not to be relegated to the world of childhood, but to be cultivated in adulthood too. The Oggetto paessagio. Disseminare e condividere section recounts the relational aspect of Lai’s practice through a large corpus of objects associated with her affective universe, including sculptures that simulate the appearance of a book or single pages, shapes that reference everyday manufactures while laying claim to their own individuality. Il viaggiatore astrale. Immaginare l’altrove brings together the series of the Geographies, visionary and fantastical astral maps that delineate constellations, chimaeras and infinite imaginary universes. The successful season of participatory works is lastly the protagonist in the section L’arte ci prende per mano. Incontrare e Partecipare. Legarsi alla montagna (1981), for example, is considered to be the first episode of relational art in Italy, a work inspired by an ancient legend in which Maria Lai succeeded in involving the entire population of the village of Ulassai. Her deeply-held belief in the redemptive power of art, the theme of play held to be fundamental to the growth of ideas for the community, art as an instrument capable of bringing people together, imagining and relating: all this and more renders Maria Lai one of the most innovative artists of her generation, one who managed to intercept and interpret at their origin specific cultural mechanisms that underlie contemporary society. As in the Looms and the weavings that were so dear to her, with her threads strung between tradition and contemporaneity have traced a dense network of relations between people, contributing to a profound change in personal, social and collective stories and identities.