A wonderful exhibition catalogue from Mexican artist Magali Lara’s latest exhibition at the MUAC in Mexico City (AprilOctober 25), showcasing a reverse retrospective of her work.

Five Decades in Spiral reviews Lara’s artistic and spatial experiments over the course of her career and the ways in which she creates a formal and plastic yet affective sense of place, a territory of one’s own.

Over more than fifty years, Magali Lara has been a key figure in feminist art in Latin America, addressing themes such as fragility, everyday violence, sensuality, and the female experience. Her work spans various disciplines, including painting, drawing, animation, objects, and graphic design.

The exhibition begins with murals she created specifically for this show and concludes with her earliest drawings from the 1980s and 1970s. Lara is interested in the notion of the opposite space, that remnant concealed through absence. Her work has questioned the meaning of the white of the canvas or paper and our ways of denoting the pauses and imperceptible silences between brushstrokes and gestures, as well as the miniscule gaps between words and images. Her artistic creations are an exploration of an endless place drawn out into a spiral, sketching a negative trace that opens up and expands toward other narratives. She creates her own visual language, seen in the value placed on the expressivity of her lines, the way she introduces writing into the representation of spaces and objects and the forms of her vegetable and corporeal allusions, which delicately and playfully explore the erotic and existential circumstances of contemporary women.