Magali Lara: “Stitched to the Body”
Installation view of Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York, 2025. Photo: George Etheredge
At ISLAA, Magali Lara’s first solo exhibition in the US, titled Stitched to the Body, leads the audience into the vortex of Lara’s mind, without pretending to be a retrospective. Since the 1970s, Lara has explored the themes of identity, intimacy, memory, and the body via a multidisciplinary practice that spans collage, drawing, illustration, painting, ceramics, bookmaking, and installations. The viewer enters the space and sees it unfold like a personal diary, pulled across decades of experimentation, each piece unraveling and rethreading.
Including more than fifty works from ISLAA’s archive, the show spans three rooms, not in chronological order, embracing the rhythm of Lara’s own practice, one that resists linear narratives. “This is not an exhibition organized by time,” says Clara Prat-Gay, curatorial assistant at ISLAA. “It’s like a puzzle you have to solve, but I also think we’re playing with Magali’s idea of going back and forth.” The show revisits some of her most defining works from the 1970s to the 1990s.
The earliest work exhibited in the space is Lara’s series called Ventanas (1977–78) (windows). Showed in fragments, it represents a time when she was working from her own room at her parents’ place. A young Lara emulates the façade of an apartment building in Mexico City and lets the voyeur peek inside while she peeks out. These intimate collage portraits in wood that include lipstick stains, typed text, and photocopied scraps of her own self hidden in the Mexican metropolis work as a metaphor for the solitude of the woman artist.
That concept of visibility as a woman in the arts becomes explicit and creates a segway for her series, Frida (1978), a work that proves how frustration can turn into artistic fuel. For Lara, the figure of Kahlo was both an icon and a problem. In this series, she reacts to critic Raquel Tibol’s book Frida Kahlo: crónica, testimonios y aproximaciones, a text that, instead of drawing attention to Kahlo as a woman artist, still tied her career to Diego Rivera’s figure.
In this context, it’s worth mentioning that Magali Lara emerged from a post-’68 Mexico, a time when female artists weren’t simply making art but forging spaces where they were previously unwelcome. So Lara didn’t just critique the book; she tore it apart. Quite literally. Using photostat technology (a precursor to photocopying), she manipulated the book’s pages, inserted her own handwriting, and produced pieces where words are written incorrectly on purpose. Along the series, Lara is giving space for her own voice to come through while the image of Kahlo begins to dissolve until it is just a “columna rota” (“broken spine”) over Lara’s lipstick kiss.
Magali Lara, New York, from the series Frida (1978). © Magali Lara
And there’s something about those lipstick kisses. They give a continuous structure to Lara’s early pieces, peaking in her series De lo amoroso, personal, confidencial, etcétera (1982). The drawings seem to come from pages torn from a personal diary, with trembling lines, more lipstick stains, and fragmented sentences. The work is unstable, intimate, and erotic even.
Magali Lara, De lo amoroso, personal, confidencial, etcétera (1982). © Magali Lara
In the middle gallery, Historias de casa (1984–86) and Objetos (1981) expand her vision. No longer confined to her parents’ house, Lara paints domestic objects over bigger canvases, not as still lifes, but as living things. She uses text to inject life into these objects and bring the viewer closer to her feelings. Kettles and glasses express betrayal framed with a “Y yo no te perdono” (“And I do not forgive you”). A bathroom becomes a confession booth. A fridge holds secrets: “Guardé mi infancia en el congelador. Me pregunto, ¿cuándo la voy a sacar? ¿Cuándo la podré comer?” (“I stored my childhood in the freezer. I wonder: When will I take it out? When can I eat it?”). It’s devastating, yet it’s also funny. There’s always humor lurking in Lara’s sadness.
Installation view of Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York, 2025. Photo: George Etheredge
The exhibition’s title comes from the haunting line in one of the works in this room: Llevo mi destino cosido al cuerpo, luego lo lavo (“I wear my destiny stitched to the body, then I wash it”). The image of clothes and stockings hanging from a clothesline is that of a domestic ritual that becomes something else when Lara merges poetic language and text with the visual form. Now it evokes the complexities of a predetermined role inscribed on a woman’s body, and how it can get turned into an act of renewal when it gets “washed.”
Magali Lara, Luego lo lavo, from the series Historias de casa (1984). © Magali Lara
Going back to this sentiment of not being fully accepted in artistic spaces just for the sake of being a woman, Magali Lara’s generation was trying to look for new ways of making art that could actually represent their concerns and reach the public in a more accessible way. With this in mind, the final room explores her collaboration with Carmen Boullosa, a Mexican poet, with whom Lara created artist books and provided the visual elements for Boullosa’s theatre play Cocinar hombres (To Cook Men) (1984).
The opening room of the exhibition is actually the appropriate finale for wrapping up her interdisciplinary approach to art-making. It features her latest works from the 1990s, a series of oil and acrylic in large scale, where she plays with the cycles of life, growth, and death. A game between exterior and interior landscapes, trees and plants. She produced these works after the premature death of her husband, under a period of grief that once again reflects her long-time sustained narrative: How does it feel to be a woman at any given time period, under any given circumstances?
While historically resonant, Magali Lara’s work was and is fiercely introspective, but not in a self-centered way. As Prat-Gay points out, Lara is always trying to look for other ways to explore what it means to be a woman—being a woman exposed to her context. Her work is sensitive, with a humorous component that makes it easier to overcome whenever she approaches a more hostile topic. That is why we can always feel Lara’s work hitting in different ways—harsh and satirical, angry but vulnerable, witty and playful.
Magali Lara: Stitched to the Body is on view at ISLAA through August 23, 2025.
