'Maria Lai: A Journey to America' at Magazzino / 'Sensibility Conversation' at BCMT Gallery.
Maria Lai: A Journey to America at Magazzino Italian Art Museum, Cold Spring, N.Y., through July 28, 2025.
Maria Lai Voce di infinite letture, 1992 Cotton thread, ink, canvas 9 7/8 x 10 1/4 x 2 in. (25 x 16 x 5 cm). Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo by Marco Anelli © Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
The reputation and influence of Italian artist Maria Lai (1919-2013) has grown exponentially in Italy and in Europe since the artist’s death in 2003, at age 93. In America, her works are less-often seen, so this survey, Maria Lai: A Journey to America, is an important introduction for U.S. art audiences, and serves as a gateway into the artist’s unique achievements and extraordinary mindset. Curated by Paola Mura, artistic director of Magazzino Italian Art, the exhibition contains some 100 works in a variety of mediums, spanning Maria Lai’s long career. Also included are documentary videos that explore the social aspects and idealistic aims of her art. Born in Italy, on the island of Sardinia, in 1919, and based there for much of her career, Lai did, in fact, visit the U.S., in 1968; the impact of America’s avant-garde would have a lasting effect on her own art. A detailed timeline of the artist’s life and work, traversing the entire wall of one gallery, goes a long way to illuminate Lai’s art and the creative context in which her unique cosmology developed and thrived.
Maria Lai Telaio in sole e mare,1971. Nails, wood, twine, tempera. 28 3/4 x 59 7/8 x 5 7/8 in. (72 x 152 x 15 cm). Magazzino Italian Art Foundation. Photo by Marco Anelli. Courtesy © Archivio Maria Lai, by Siae 2024/Artists Rights Society (ARS)
The exhibition begins with her early paintings from the 1950s, rendering Sardinia’s rugged rocky landscape, and cityscapes that explore the Sardinian capital, Cagliari. By the early 1960s, she gravitated toward abstraction, and examples here, such as the highly textural Composzione Polimaterica (Polymaterila Composition), 1964, with an encrusted surface of acrylic and pieces of cork, shows Lai as being fully conversant with gestural abstraction, European art informel, and the work of Italian contemporaries such as Alberto Burri. Lai fully hits her stride by the late 1960s as she began to incorporate textiles and weaving into her abstract compositions. Some of these assemblage and collage pieces hint at Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, but with a decidedly feminist twist. Lai’s idiosyncratic constructions made of string and cloth, such as Telaio del Mattino (Frame of the morning), 1969, and Telaio in sole e mare (Framing the sun and sea), 1971, are evocative and stunning. Lai went on to produce exquisite embroidered works on cloth panels or in labor-intensive books in which she creates her own asemic written language. The best of these works on view, such as Voce di infinite letture (Voice oif Infinite readings), 1992, demand an interpretation or a way of reading that is completely individualistic, depending on the imagination and open-mindedness of each viewer. —David Ebony
Sensibility Conversation at BCMT Gallery, Kingston, N.Y., through, March, 2025.
Installation view, Sensibility Conversation, 2024, at BCMT Gallery, showing works by Margaret Griffith (on wall); and Joshua Vogel (foreground). Photo Courtesy BCMT Gallery.
The design oriented BCMT Gallery based in Kingston, N.Y., inaugurates its fine-arts gallery program with Sensibility Conversation, an engaging group exhibition featuring works by a dozen artists committed to explorations of, or investigations into the natural world. Organized by BCMT cofounder and curator Kelly Zaneto, the exhibition centers primarily on sculptures and relief objects featuring organic forms and natural materials like wood, stone, clay, wax, cotton, willow branches. water chestnuts, and cypress cones. A subdued palette of earthen tones, and novel textural nuances are attributes of each work.
Installation view, Sensibility Conversation, 2024, at BCMT Gallery, showing works by Kat Howard (on wall and on bench); and Sue Kirk (foreground, left): Joshua Vogel ion the foreground. Photo Courtesy BCMT Gallery.
Among the highlights here are medium-size sculptures by artist and BCMT cofounder Joshua Vogel that often riff on motifs found in early modernist sculptures. The limestone Cruciform (c. 2021), for instance, with its T-shape structure, recalls similarly totemic works by Constantin Brancusi. The gracefully carved, egglike shapes in Vogel’s Glacial Erratric series (2022-2023) appear to correspond to the sensuous sculptural forms of Hans Art or Henry Moore. Elsewhere in the show, the English artist Sue Kirk weaves sinewy willow branches into futuristic bird’s nest shapes that transcend any kind of conventional basketry I have seen. One of the most striking pieces on view is a mural-scale, multi-panel relief by Kat Howard. At once a sculptural tour-de-force and a natural wonder, the reductive, allover composition in various shades of pale beige and off-white, is made entirely of silk cocoons and silk thread. —David Ebony