(Mexico City, Mexico, 1956)
Magali Lara is considered a central figure of feminist postmodern art in Mexico. She has a degree in Visual Arts for Plastic Expression from the University of Guadalajara and a Master of Arts from the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos. With more than 40 years of artistic practice based on collaborations with poets and performers, Lara has developed a multidisciplinary practice that explores issues related to the unconscious, everyday life, emotions, the body, the feminine, and the “otherness”.
Influenced by women painters of the Mexican school such as Maria Izquierdo, Olga Costa, and Frida Kahlo, Lara takes up an interest in still life, objects, and dreamlike atmospheres. These elements are used to compose a unique symbolic language that she has brought to the fields of animation, drawing, writing, ceramics, the artist’s book, painting, and textiles. Mainly associated with Conceptual art, Magali Lara has been constantly working on a “poetics” that delves into the body, intimacy, desire, motherhood, childhood, sexuality, and everyday life; all this from a perspective of subjectivity. Starting from the ordinary and the visceral of the human body allows her to make a philosophical review of the human condition, something that the artist considers essential in the social function of art.
Since the nineties, she has worked at the Facultad de Artes de la Universidad Autónoma de Morelos. She is currently part of the Academic Body of the Master’s Degree in art production and participates as a jury in several biennials and artistic production, and as a study plan advisor in various arts education institutions. She is a member of the Sistema Nacional de Creadores FONCA, which she accessed for the seventh time in the 2020-2023 period. In 2019 she received the Medal of Merit in Arts from Mexico City’s Congress.
She currently lives and works in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Her work is represented in collections in the United States, Mexico and Argentina.
