Maria Lai / Living Collapse / Gli anni, Capitolo 3

The Maria Lai exhibition is part of an initiative launched by Madre at the start of its 2023 programming cycle, under the presidency of Angela Tecce and the directorship of Eva Fabbris: to bring visibility and historiographical rigor to the practices of female artists who worked in the second half of the twentieth century with a radicalism that is often still underrecognized. Following those on Kazuko Miyamoto and Tomaso Binga, the exhibition on Maria Lai expands this commitment, bringing to the forefront a body of work in which the practice of gesture, the transmission of knowledge, and the collective memory of women’s labor converge in an original visual language. 

This exhibition coincides with the second winning exhibition of the Premio Meridiana; shortly after comes the opening of the third chapter of the exhibition series Gli anni, which continues and deepens the exploration of the history of exhibitions in Naples and the Campania region.

Maria Lai: To Be Is to Weave, curated by Mónica Amor and Carlos Basualdo, in collaboration with the Maria Lai Archive and Foundation, is dedicated to the work of the Sardinian artist (1919–2013), which spans more than six decades. The exhibition traces the material, formal, and conceptual shifts through which Lai redefined the relationship between art, language, memory, and collective experience. The exhibition is organized along a path that is both chronological and thematic, and highlights Lai’s constant experimentation with assemblage, textiles, sewing, collage, and orality, situating her work within broader debates on abstraction, materiality, feminism, and the crisis of the artistic object in postwar Italy. The exhibition features approximately 200 works, as well as documentary material and artist’s books, drawn from Italian and international museums. In the exhibition, and in keeping with Madre’s specific mission, attention is also devoted to the educational dimension of Maria Lai’s work, understood as a relational practice in which play and learning serve as tools for engaging the relationship between the artwork and the public. The catalogue is published by Lenz Press.

The Premio Meridiana, curated by Mario Francesco Simeone and promoted by museo Madre and the Amici del Madre ETS, with the support of Antony Morato and Fondazione Tridama ETS, aims to promote curatorial research on southern Italy and its emerging art scene. Living Collapse, curated by Samuele Piazza (Parma, 1988), is the second exhibition to win the award and features works by artists Andrea Bolognino (Naples, 1991), Effe Minelli (Pompeii, 1986), and Raffaela Naldi Rossano (Naples, 1990). The context is a reinterpretation of the nativity scene tradition, drawing inspiration from Jimmie Durham’s work Presepio in the Madre collection. The Neapolitan nativity scene is thus exploited as a critical device, highlighting the affinities between this art form and certain sensibilities of contemporary art. What emerges is a layered and non-linear interpretation of the tradition, filtered through the practices of the artists invited, whose works resonate with one another and with a traditional nativity scene.

Finally, on July 9, the third chapter of the exhibition Gli anni opens, dedicated to exploring episodes in the history of art from the most recent decades in Naples. The Madre collection thus engages with public and private collections to evoke significant moments and artistic production that have taken place throughout the Campania territory with emblematic works. Gli anni, Capitolo 3—curated by Eva Fabbris with Marta Federici, Laura Mariano, and Alberta Romano—features works by Valerio Adami, Carlo Alfano, Nanni Balestrini, Stefania Carlotti, Francesco Clemente, Cheryl Donegan, Peter Fischli, Sylvie Fleury, Elisa Giardina Papa, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Sean Landers, Rosa Panaro, Giulia Piscitelli, Pipilotti Rist, Grazia Toderi, Lorenzo Scotto Di Luzio, and Jordan Wolfson and Lorenzo Coletta with Amin Dolcezza (formerly De Cupis & Miin—Amor), Contropotere, Radford Electronics, Renato Grieco.
Also featured in Gli anni is a sound piece by Hira Nabi, commissioned by Soundshapes: a curatorial project by Carolin Köchling and Julia Grosse.