Maria Lai

Maria Lai was born in 1919 in Ulassai, Sardinia. From childhood, she showed a remarkable artistic talent and had the opportunity— even if just by chance—to come into contact with the art world (she posed for Francesco Ciusa for a portrait of her late younger sister). A few years later, her family decided to enroll her in secondary school in Cagliari, where she met Salvatore Cambosu, who was the first to recognize her artistic sensibility. In 1939, she moved to Rome to attend the Art High School, and upon completing her studies, she left for Verona and, later, Venice, where she enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts, where she had the opportunity to take classes with Arturo Martini.

She returned to Sardinia, not without difficulty, in 1945. There he rekindled his friendship with Salvatore Cambosu, and taught drawing in elementary schools in Cagliari. He returned to Rome in 1956 and, the following year, held his first solo exhibition at the L’Obelisco gallery. However, the critical acclaim received on that occasion did not meet the artist’s personal expectations, and she thus began a long period of reflection during which she rediscovered the world of poets and writers, including Giuseppe Dessì, her neighbor across the street in Rome, with whom she cultivated a relationship of deep friendship and collaboration.

In 1971, at the Schneider Gallery in Rome, she exhibited her first Telai, a series that defined the following decade and brought her closer to the themes of Arte Povera, while in the 1980s she devoted herself to her first site-specific works, which would yield the most significant results of her career.

In 1981, he created Legarsi alla Montagna, a collaborative project in Ulassai that stands as his masterpiece; it foreshadowed the themes and methods of what would later be defined—only in 1998—by art critic Nicolas Bourriaud as “relational art.” Starting in the 1990s, she launched a series of public art projects that, thanks to a programmatic vision, would eventually transform Ulassai into a veritable open-air museum, finding its highest expression in the Stazione dell’Arte, a museum of contemporary art dedicated to her. Her works are now held in major public institutions, including Palazzo Grassi in Venice, Palazzo Mirto in Palermo, and Villa Borghese in Rome, as well as in prestigious international museums such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.