MAGALI LARA: MEXICAN FEMINISM IN NEW YORK

Lara emerged in the 1970s alongside a generation of women artists who expanded the second-wave feminist assertion that “the personal is political.” Featuring more than fifty works, this exhibition marks the first large-scale solo presentation of Lara’s work in New York, reflecting her sustained engagement with narratives of identity, intimacy, and domesticity, as well as her commitment to reshaping feminist art in Mexico through an interdisciplinary approach to art-making.

Through works produced between 1977 and 1995, this exhibition explores tensions between interior and exterior, private and public, secrecy and exposure in Lara’s practice. Across paintings, drawings, collages, photostats, and artist’s books, Lara blends visual and poetic languages to craft fragmented yet distinct contemplations on individuality. Her later paintings feature fluid, organic compositions where branching and rooting lines evoke a permeable body susceptible to perpetual change.

Through meditations on growth and renewal, loss and decay, her Works become traces of an inner landscape—an external world viewed from within, or intimacy glimpsed from afar.

Lara’s drawings and collages similarly engage with the shifting relationship between self and society. Through layering and repetition, her performative sequences build subtly shifting perspectives, capturing the elusiveness of self-definition while inviting new understandings of subjectivity.

Domestic scenes—strewn with clothing and floral motifs— evoke bodily presence through absence and memory. By resisting direct representation, Lara subverts traditional associations between femininity and still life, transforming personal experience into a reflection on vulnerability, desire, and loss.

In deconstructing identity to reimagine selfhood, Lara turns introspection into a radical act of resistance. Her work reflects a generation of Latin American women artists who redefined feminine expression, harnessing the body’s desires, emotions, and contradictions to create new ways of expressing intimacy.

Deeply introspective yet outward-looking, her practice maps emotional, domestic, and literary terrains that are at once intimate and profoundly resonant within the history of contemporary Latin American art.

Magali Lara (b. 1956, Mexico) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose practice blends painting, drawing, and mixed media with a strong emphasis on feminist theory and personal experience. Deeply influenced by the livre d’artiste tradition, Lara often merges text and image to explore memory, identity, and intimacy. Her early involvement in Mexico’s second-wave feminist movement shaped her distinctive auto-archival approach, as seen in works like Ventanas and Frida, which feature domestic motifs and repetitive forms. Through collaborations with cultural figures and a continuous focus on emotional expression—from lip-printed collages in De lo amoroso (1982) to botanical and household imagery in later series—Lara creates a deeply personal yet universally resonant visual language that captures the raw, shifting essence of selfhood.

Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body will be on display until August 23, 2025, at ISLAA, 142 Franklin Street, New York (United States).