A major exhibition on Maria Lai's public art in Sassari, Italy.

On view through January 31, 2018 is the exhibition Maria Lai. Art in public space, a monographic exhibition dedicated to Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 - Cardedu, 2013) held at theEx Convento del Carmelo in Sassari.

Of Maria Lai we remember above all the performance Legarsi alla montagna, which undoubtedly constitutes her masterpiece and is the work best known to the general public. However, her commitment to public art does not begin and, above all, does not end with this celebrated choral operation, held in Ulassai in September 1981, which in fact represented the first example of “Relational Art” in Italy. In fact, there are several environmental interventions and participatory works performed by Maria Lai in public spaces during the last thirty years of her activity, which, despite the massive critical and media attention reserved for the artist, have remained on the margins of the albeit important initiatives and publications dedicated to her.

The exhibition Maria Lai. Art in Public Space, curated by Davide Mariani, which opened last November 23 in the spaces of the Ex Convento del Carmelo in Sassari, was created with the intention of filling this cognitive gap and investigates, for the first time in depth, Maria Lai’s entire public art production in order to contribute to the critical reinterpretation of her artistic path.

In the whole of the more than thirty events and public works presented, the exhibition, divided according to two thematic sections (Tie/connect, Macrocosm/microcosm), traces Maria’s creative geography following her gesture, sign and thought, all amplified within the public dimension letting the profile of an artist largely different from what we are used to seeing shine through.

In fact, the exhibition, thanks to careful bibliographic research, defines his areas of production, recounts his historical events, clarifies episodes and contextualizes them, displaying numerous unpublished materials from public and private archives, as well as projects, models and autograph works of conceptual reference for environmental interventions and collective participation. The exhibition itinerary, signed by Alberto Paba, develops along the three floors of the Carmel and tends to enhance the experiential dimension of the exhibition through the rich presence of audiovisuals, projections and interactive installations. Thematic similarities and common cross-references between the works made in the area and Maria Lai’s artistic production as a whole are privileged, transforming the research on public art into a new magnifying glass on her creative and symbolic making, the programmatic vision of her interventions, her actions and her creative and aesthetic aims.

“Great art is that which reaches the people walking down the street,” argued Antonio Gramsci, and Maria, who fully shared this position, would work throughout her career to bring art closer to the people, convinced that it was necessary, from an early age, to educate them to follow its “rhythm.” “Art needs this daily attendance,” the artist declared, “it is like daily bread.”

Here is where his language finds different communicative dimensions: “from very far and from very near,” common expressions of a “maximum” and a “minimum” that are nothing but two sides of the same coin, in which the relationship with the self can extend to the most remote space and at the same time return to the microcosm of everyday life.The exhibition is presented as a journey through Maria Lai’s work made possible also thanks to the involvement of all the municipalities in which the artist worked, starting from Ulassai, her hometown, passing through Aggius, Camerino, Carbonia, Castelnuovo di Farfa, Nuoro, Orotelli, Osini, Siliqua, Sinnai, Tortolì and Villasimius.

The exhibition route:
1) Tie / connect
When Maria Lai made the intervention Legarsi alla montagna in Ulassai in 1981, she does not find, by her own admission, the right term to define the operation, despite the similarities with other events in the aesthetic field. What leaves her apparently speechless is an important, revolutionary fact: in Ulassai the author of the intervention is the village, not a single artist. Starting from this famous intervention, the exhibition section will investigate those collective practices carried out by the artist during the last thirty years of his career. Actions such as Reperto (Villasimius, 1982), L’alveare del Poeta. Omaggio a Cambosu (Orotelli, 1984),L’albero del Miele Amaro (Siliqua, 1997), Essere è tessere (Aggius, 2008), lend themselves well to identify the typical elements of Maria Lai’s modus operandi and her lively interest in relationships with communities of reference for a real sharing of aesthetic experience.

2) Macrocosm / Microcosm.
Maria Lai is undoubtedly the artist who has left the greatest number of significant public art works on the Island, managing over time to transform her hometown of Ulassai into a veritable “open-air museum.” One of the first occasions when the artist had the opportunity to try his hand at creating a public art intervention was the aesthetic upgrading of his village’s washhouse, which took place starting in 1982. The funds, made available by the municipal administration for Legarsi alla montagna, had not been spent by the explicit will of the artist and, so, after a series of consultations with the community, it was decided to intervene in the washhouse, a symbolic place of the small town, with a series of works made specifically for those spaces with the involvement also of other artists such as Luigi Veronesi, Costantino Nivola and Guido Strazza. From that moment Maria began to devote herself with increasing commitment also in the public sphere and, from the early 1990s, she gave shape to a series of environmental interventions with a great visual impact, such as Le capre cucite (1992), La strada del rito (1992) and La scarpata (1993) in Ulassai,Proiezione (1999), executed in the square of the Church of Santa Barbara in Sinnai, those made in the small town of Castelnuovo di Farfa (2000), where she worked with other artists on works for the Museum of theOlio della Sabina, to more recent ones such as the homage to Grazia Deledda with Andando via (2012) made in Nuoro the year before she died, at the age of 93.
The exhibition is completed with the production of the first monograph on Maria Lai’s public art, edited by Davide Mariani. The catalog(Agave editions), scheduled for release in January 2019, will be divided according to two thematic sections related to the artist’s strands of action, the one dedicated to relational art and the one inherent to environmental interventions, to which will be added a rich system of apparatuses.

The exhibition is realized under the patronage of the Presidency of the Regional Council of Sardinia, Presidency of the Regional Council of Sardinia, Province of Sassari, Municipality of Aggius, Municipality of Camerino, Municipality of Carbonia, Municipality of Castelnuovo di Farfa, Municipality ofNuoro, Municipality of Orotelli, Municipality of Osini, Municipality of Siliqua, Municipality of Sinnai, Municipality of Tortolì, Municipality of Ulassai, Municipality of Villasimius and Cooperativa Teatrale Fueddu e Gestu. Opening hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 4 to 7 p.m.

Pictured: Maria Lai, Working on La scarpata, 1993

A major exhibition on Maria Lai's public art in Sassari, Italy.

Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.