Magali Lara: Glaciers

Glaciers is a solo exhibition by Mexico-based artist Magali Lara, co-curated by Department of Art and Art History faculty member Dr. Andrea Giunta and former faculty member Dr. Roberto Tejada.

“Hazy caresses of graphite on paper. Quiver of curved lines so meandering in animation and music as to interlace. In Glaciers, multimedia artist Magali Lara conveys sensorial excess as akin to her encounters with the colossal frozen mass found in Patagonia. Travel log of an experience, this work commands a voyage — drawings in blue and indigo to the sight and sound of ice collapsing. Insofar as drawings can trace an emotion, so too can music make metaphor of time’s reverberation: blue diamonds in crystalline water.

“This exhibition is meant to commemorate markers in the histories of Argentina and Mexico. It serves also as an allegory about distances that can separate specific geography from eyewitness — the space between the Perito Moreno Glacier in Argentina, and Magali Lara, a resident of Cuernavaca, Mexico. Its iconography bears no mark of national heroism or history, no battles or declarations, no link to institutional narratives or iconic accounts. Magali Lara displaces history with her individual observation of nature.

“A contemplative experience, this work gives way to a concert of images, chromatic intensities, and movements, and to an interface with sound. (Ana Lara, a contemporary composer and the artist’s sister, created the score.) In Glaciers, Magali Lara coins a vocabulary for depicting a state of emergency and vanishing lines of a journey. She celebrates the physical world in its immensity, distance, and awesome beauty, even as she tells the story of nature’s suspended state: a stand-in for personal loss and grieving."

— Dr. Andrea Giunta and Dr. Roberto Tejada
CLAVIS, Center for Latin American Visual Studies

Bio

Magali Lara lives and works in Cuernavaca, Mexico. She received her B.A. from the National School of Applied Arts in Mexico City in 1977 and has exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art, Mexico City and the National Museum in Havana, Cuba. Lara’s works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Centro Cultural Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City.