Magali Lara
Infancia y eso (Childhood and that)
A visual artist, curator, and teacher, she has been working since the 1970s on art related to the body and emotions, creating visual essays that explore identity, femininity, otherness, and the connection between the inner and the outer self. She studied at the National Art School at UNAM. In 1977, she held her first solo exhibition there, titled Scissors. She worked with Grupo Março and collaborated with No-Grupo in the 1970s and has exhibited widely in Mexico, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, the United States, France, and Cuba. In 1981, she co-curated, with Emma Cecilia García and Gilda Castillo, the first exhibition of contemporary Mexican women artists, which traveled to Künstlerhaus Bethanien in West Berlin, and later organized artist book exhibitions in the United States and Brazil. During the 1980s, she published visual poetry in various specialized magazines and began painting and printmaking, shifting away from collective practice toward a more personal investigation. With more than forty years as an artist and twenty as a teacher, she has held numerous solo exhibitions in national and international museums, and her work is included in important collections in Mexico and abroad. In 2019, she participated in Radical Women, focused on women artists from 1970 to 1985, presented at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. In 2025, she had a solo exhibition at MUAC in Mexico titled Five Decades in a Spiral, and at ISLAA in New York, a survey of her work titled Stitch to the Body. (Mónica Mayer)
"Following the invitation to exhibit in West Berlin in 1981, I conceived a performance about the difficulty of speaking about one’s emotions as a girl, and especially about the feeling that one inhabits a violent world shaped by the mandate of femininity—an oppressive space in which any exercise of autonomy is experienced as a form of disloyalty. The performance consisted of tracing a family tree based on affections and complicities—a structure more akin to a rhizome."
courtesy Magila Lara
Format
Performance
Document media
Photographs
Issue date
1980
To be seen in
re.act.feminism #4 - Archival Chain Reactions, MSUM, Ljubljana, 2026
Relations
#4 LAR 2/P