The Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA) is pleased to present Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body, an exhibition that examines a key moment in the career of pioneering Mexican artist Magali Lara (b. 1956). 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.

The exhibition features some of Lara’s most defining works, including the Ventanas series (1977–78), the Frida collages (1978), Objetos (1981), De lo amoroso, personal, confidencial, etcétera (1982), Historias de casa (1984–86), Ramificaciones (1995), Lealtad (1980–81), and Cocinar hombres (1984–85). 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.

On view from April 26 to August 23, 2025, Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body is curated by the ISLAA curatorial team, with special thanks to Clara Prat-Gay, curatorial assistant. It is accompanied by an original booklet featuring texts by Magali Lara and Madeline Murphy Turner, designed by Luiza Dale, ISLAA’s graphic designer in residence.

142 Franklin Street in Tribeca
New York, NY 10013
USA

2025-04-26