FIVE DECADES IN SPIRAL BY MAGALI LARA AT THE MUAC
Through the idea of an endless spiral, this exhibition at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC) unfolds as a reverse retrospective of artist Magali Lara (Mexico City, 1956), beginning with two murals created especially for the show and tracing back to her earliest drawings from the 1980s and 1970s.
Five Decades in Spiral revisits Lara’s artistic and spatial explorations throughout her career and the way she creates a formal and plastic, but also emotional, space—a territory of her own. As a feminist artist, her work offers images and narratives about the reciprocity between beings and sensations, states and emotions, feelings and material gestures, in an intimate expression transferred into the dialogue between objects, lines, and pigments.
Although she participated in collective practices during the 1970s, her work has focused on the creation of a personal visual language, recognizable by the expressiveness of her lines, the way writing is embedded in the representation of spaces and objects, and the way her allusions to vegetal or bodily forms allow her to delicately and humorously explore the erotic and existential swings of contemporary female experience.
The exhibition’s various spaces function as a universe of negotiation between media, forms, and colors, in which Lara delves into experimentation and the transgression of plastic and conceptual boundaries. Beyond simply translating one medium into another, the artist interweaves the expressive possibilities of each format and their tactile approaches: from the subtlety and linearity of her drawings to the brushstroke and density of her painting; from the texture of gobelins and tapestries to the sequence and composition of artist books; from the immediacy and intervention of photography and photostats to the finish of ceramics and the storytelling in animations—where the screen becomes a canvas and sound emerges as a new protagonist.
Since the beginning of her practice, Lara has been drawn to the notion of the opposing space—the remnant that underlies absence. Her research has explored how to signify the whiteness of the canvas and the paper, how to denote the imperceptible pauses and silences between brushstrokes and gestures, as well as the minute voids that emerge between words and images. In this way, her artistic experimentation becomes the exploration of a place that never fully resolves—an ever-extending spiral that sketches a negative trace, opening up into new narratives.
