The Fondazione Donnaregina per le arti contemporanee – museo Madre in Naples, presents the exhibition Maria Lai. To Be Is to Weave opening on June 25 2026. Dedicated to one of the most unique artistic careers in postwar Italy, the exhibition spans over six decades, tracing the material, formal, and conceptual transformations through which the artist redefined the relationship between art, language, memory, and collective experience.
The exhibition, curated by Mónica Amor and Carlos Basualdo in collaboration with the Maria Lai Archive and Foundation, unfolds along a path that is both chronological and thematic, highlighting Lai’s constant experimentation with assemblage, textiles, sewing, collage, and orality, while situating her work within broader debates on abstraction, materiality, feminism, and the crisis of the artistic object in postwar Italy.
The exhibition and its accompanying catalogue also aim to fill major historical and archival gaps, opening new lines of research into Lai’s work. Through newly gathered documentation, revised chronologies, archival materials, and focused analyses of key groups of works—including her Telai, Tele Cucite, Libri Cuciti, Collages, and Fiabe—the project highlights the complexity of a practice all too often reduced to biographical or regional categories. Rather than constituting an end in itself, this local register emerges as a crucial structural thread through which Lai developed a sophisticated reflection on the limits of the artistic object and the art system. Particular attention is devoted to the decisive 1971 exhibition at the Galleria Schneider in Rome, presented here as a fundamental turning point in a trajectory marked by a material intelligence that constantly blurred the boundaries between art and life.
As part of the exhibition, a room dedicated to education will be featured within the exhibition: alongside several works by Maria Lai herself, it will also host specific activities and resources related to learning about and exploring her artistic practice.
The catalogue, issued by Lenz Press, contains an introduction by Mónica Amor and Carlos Basualdo, a historical essay by Mónica Amor, catalogue entries by Carol Armstrong, Giulia Brandinelli, Barbara Casavecchia, Michele D’Aurizio, Francesca Filisetti, and Sharon Hecker, as well as two essays by Elisabetta Rattalino and Chandra Livia Candiani.