A survey of work by the pioneering Mexican feminist artist reimagine landscapes and home interiors as sites of political and emotional tension.
The first thing that came to mind when I looked at Magali Lara’s 1990 “Y entonces escuché el fuego” (“And then I heard the fire”) was the art of J.M.W. Turner. The painting, part of the artist’s survey Stitched to the Body at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art, is a turbulent landscape where nature bends itself into oceanic waves. A flash of searing orange exhaled from a tree trunk into the blue sky reminded me of Turner’s “The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834” (1835). But upon a second glance, the untamed vision of one of Mexico’s pioneering feminist artists refused to be beholden to the canon of White, male European art. Lara’s sinuous trees, in sync with a mosaic of blue and indigo brushstrokes, are not overtaken by the elements but rather move with them; their roots and branches seemingly shape the world around them through sheer psychical force.