Holding Hands with the Sun. MAXXI dedicates an exhibition to Maria Lai on the centenary of her birth

On the occasion of the centenary of her birth, MAXXI is dedicating a major exhibition to Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 - Cardedu, 2013), among the most singular voices of contemporary Italian art, whose works were recently exhibited at Documenta 14 and the 2017 Venice Biennale. The exhibition, titled Tenendo per mano il sole (Holding the sun by the hand), aims to be a tribute to a great artist who was able to create, ahead of the latest relational art research, a language capable of combining sensibility, local traditions and global codes.

Holding hands with the sun is the title of the exhibition and of the first Stitched Fairy Tale made. Both the title and the work contain many of the typical elements of Lai’s research: his interest in poetry, language and speech; the cosmogony of his geographies evoked by the sun; and the pedagogical vocation of “holding hands.” This is not a classic retrospective, but rather a narrative that does not adhere to purely chronological constraints and panders to a peculiar biographical and artistic path, characterized by discourses and insights seemingly left unsaid only to be taken up again many years later.

Through a wide selection of works, most of them previously unpublished, the exhibition presents Maria Lai’s multifaceted world and the dense layering of ideas and suggestions that characterized her imagination. The itinerary unfolds through five sections, named after quotations or titles of Lai’s works, while the subtitle describes typical modes of her research; each section is accompanied by Maria Lai’s voice through a montage of unpublished materials made by director Francesco Casu. There is also a final, ideal section documenting the environmental art works created in the territory and particularly in Ogliastra.

For all information about the exhibition, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi and Luigia Lonardelli in collaboration with the Maria Lai Archive, you can visit the official MAXXI website.

Pictured: a detail of Holding the Sun by the Hand (1983) by Maria Lai

Holding Hands with the Sun. MAXXI dedicates an exhibition to Maria Lai on the centenary of her birth

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