Maria Lai - Italian Contemporary Art

 

 Maria Lai (Ulassai, 1919 – Cardedu, 2013) was one of the most singular voices in Italian art from World War II on.
Her special talent for drawing led her in 1939 to enrol in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, the only woman in those years to study sculpture under Arturo Martini. In the fifties, she moved to Rome, where she was able to observe various contemporary artistic developments, first through contacts with Art Informel and then, in the next decade, with the emergence of Arte Povera and Conceptual Art. From these movements, she derived an interest in materials, both organic and those related to pre-industrial civilization, and in the gesture as a process, filtering these interests through an absolutely individual sensibility. From this period the relationship with the traditions of her land became central to her work, in a conceptual outlook with an anthropological matrix. Together with drawing, her output was enriched with subjects and materials close to an ancient, popular culture as in the case of her sculptures of bread, in itself a plain and perishable product, closely associated with everyday life and women’s work.
During the Seventies, the artist also created a series of works central to the development of her artistic language, which she called Telai (“Looms”), works that combined painting and sculpture and in which the age-old tradition of weaving was opened up to new compositional possibilities. The community, relational and memorial impulse finds its summation in the artist’s environmental interventions. (From MADRE, Naples site)

 

Marisa Merz - Italian Contemporary Art - Arte Povera

Marisa Merz (1926 –2019) was an Italian artist and sculptor.In the 1960s, Merz was the only female protagonist associated with the radical Arte povera movement. In 2013 she was awarded the prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale.She lived and worked in Turin, Italy
In June 1967, Merz had her first solo exhibition at the Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery in Turin, for which she made a folded aluminum foil installation. In October 1968, she participated in the three day Arte Povera + Azione Povera event, curated by Germano Celant, in Amalfi. This Arte povera event, which also included the artists Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Giovanni Anselmo, and Mario Merz, was radical for its avant-garde display of every day "poor" materials as art. Her work continued to reflect many of the fundamental issues with which Arte Povera artists are preoccupied, such as organic forms, subjectivity, the use of lower forms of art, including crafts, and the relationship between art and life.Wikipedia
Working with both traditional and non-traditional materials, the artist’s works often blur the categorization of domestic objects—blankets, bowls of salt, and boots—with art objects, such as sculpted heads and painted angels. “