Marta Palau, a sculptor whose work tackled feminist themes at a time when few others in Mexico did, has died at the age of 88. The Mexican National Institute of Arts and Letters (INBAL) announced her death in a statement Friday.
Inbal said Palau “has made an invaluable contribution to the culture of Mexico and Latin America.”
While Palau’s work remains relatively unrecognized outside of Mexico, it is highly respected within the country in which she has resided almost all her life. She started as a painter, and during the 1970s, she began producing the works for which she is best known, sculptures containing natural materials.
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Most often, these sculptures prominently make use of tapestry and textiles, moving a medium that has long been considered a feminine work toward a more conceptual end.
Born in Albisa, Spain in 1934, Palau moved with her family in 1940 to Tijuana after the fall of the Second Spanish Republic. She went to art school in the country, but did not study textile making with artist Josep Grau-Gariga in Barcelona in the 1960s until she settled on what would become her medium of choice.
In 1968, Palau became one of the 45 established artists Salon Independent, an initiative that sought to show conceptual art that stands in sharp opposition to the depiction and abstraction favored by Mexican politicians. At one of the shows organized by Salón Independiente, Palau and Gilberto Aceves Navarro . demonstrated Ambientación alquímica (Alchemical Environment), 1970, Structure made of wood slats lined with newsprint. Viewers can walk between the panels and watch, in their center, a large yellow triangle drawn with fragments of the word “Tetragrammaton,” a translated version of God’s name in Hebrew texts.
The work was destroyed, but a replica was created. in an interview with La JornadaPalau described the piece as a “mantra of protection and power,” referring to a shamanic trait that appeared in many of her works in the years that followed.
Other Palau artifacts from this era show an explicitly sexual character. Elyra F (1973), a jute and cotton carving named after the province in which Palau was born, features a large slash in the center that makes it appear vaginal. Cascada (Waterfall), 1978, is more sexually explicit. It is a large installation shaped where a series of thin nylon arrays hang on a wall and are allowed to run across the floor. Palau called it the “River of Sperm.”
Subsequent work by Palau would make significant use of locally sourced materials. Henequen (a plant used to make agave) and corn husks appear frequently in her work in the 1980s; I transformed them into installations that take into account the relationship between the body and the surrounding landscape. Towards the end of the decade, she combined her spiritual interests with this material for a series called “Naualli,” which is named after the Nahuatl for the word “witch” or “witch.”
Palau’s work has been well received in Mexico, and has been featured in biennials such as the 1986 Havana Biennale, where it won first prize, and the 1987 São Paulo Biennale. In 2017, she was featured in the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, which appeared in That year at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles before heading to the Brooklyn Museum.
Members of the Mexican art scene have taken to social media to mourn Palau. Amin Cuauhtemoc Medina wrote on Twitter She was the Greatest Textile Sculptor in Mexico.
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