The first thing that came to mind when I looked at Magali Lara’s 1990 “Y entonces escuché el fuego” (“And then I heard the fire”) was the art of J.M.W. Turner. The painting, part of the artist’s survey Stitched to the Body at the Institute for the Study of Latin American Art, is a turbulent landscape where nature bends itself into oceanic waves. A flash of searing orange exhaled from a tree trunk into the blue sky reminded me of Turner’s “The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16th October, 1834” (1835). But upon a second glance, the untamed vision of one of Mexico’s pioneering feminist artists refused to be beholden to the canon of White, male European art. Lara’s sinuous trees, in sync with a mosaic of blue and indigo brushstrokes, are not overtaken by the elements but rather move with them; their roots and branches seemingly shape the world around them through sheer psychical force.This and a handful of other abstracted landscapes from the 1990s open the show — the artist’s largest New York survey to date, with more than 50 works spanning 1977 to 1995. These pieces won’t prepare viewers new to Lara for the disarming intimacy to come, but they establish the emotional landscapes underlying her physical ones.Magali Lara, “Y entonces escuché el fuego” (1990)The next gallery steps back to the late 1970s when Lara, then in her early 20s, began making art books and collages. Works from her Frida series (1978) incorporating text and degraded photocopies pay homage to Kahlo as a fountainhead for Mexican women artists, while lipstick prints in her De lo amoroso, personal, confidencial, etcétera series (1982) signify a femininity that is at once cheeky and disruptive.Arranged in a grid in the same gallery are collages from her Ventanas series (1977–78) that act as windows into private spaces. Some are fully abstract; three on view incorporate or suggest stitching, which could allude to fabric drapes or sewn skin, conflating the domestic sphere with the body. Others include text, and still others feature photocopied images of a woman — the artist. A piece that pairs her picture with that of a chair layers the voyeuristic effect of looking at Lara and into a living space with the experience of peering into art history: The chair is an icon of early modernism from 1898–99 by German designer Richard Riemerschmid, evoking the historical domains of men in the art or design studio and women in the home. An especially charged image shows the eyes of a woman peering back at the viewer through blinds. Magali Lara, works from the Ventanas series (1977–78)It didn’t occur to me that the paintings on view were all unpeopled until I reached “Naturaleza muerta” (“Still life”) from the 1986 series La infiel (“The unfaithful”). The work, dominated by bold red and yellow, depicts a vase holding roses near a slithering snake and a pair of high-heeled shoes; hanging above all else, in the top right quarter, are what look like the dangling legs and feet of a woman. The reference to still lifes artificially aestheticizes the image, consigning the devastating (and gendered) drama of being to the annals of art history. The entire show builds on the intensity of embodying the maxim “the personal is political,” but Lara’s colorful paintings of banal interiors — specifically, bathrooms and kitchens — hit with the most visceral impact. The undulant clawfoot bathtub in “Intimidad” (1984), with its creatural spout, seems ready to plod away from the green wall, jarringly juxtaposed with a flat lilac-purple background in an undefined space. The stocky toilet and springy toilet paper roll in “Escusado” (1984) appear to converse with a drain hovering in a yellow void, all three objects projecting an uncanny sentience. Another work, “Luego lo lavo” (1984), fills in the same space with laundry on a clothesline and the text for which the show is named, “Llevo mi destino cosido al cuerpo, luego lo lavo” (“I wear my destiny stitched to the body, then I wash it”). With this statement, the artist takes on prescribed women’s roles only to slough them off. Transforming “wash” from a chore to a means of liberation, she takes back her domestic space from all the hopes, expectations, and histories that haunt it.Magali Lara, “Naturaleza muerta” (1986)Magali Lara, works from the De lo amoroso, personal, confidencial, etcétera series (1982) Magali Lara, “Intimidad” (1984) from the series Historias de casaMagali Lara, “Un lapso” (1981) from the series ObjetosMagali Lara, “Escusado” (1984) from the series Historias de casaMagali Lara: Stitched to the Body continues at the Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (142 Franklin Street, Tribeca, Manhattan) through August 16. The exhibition was organized by ISLAA’s curatorial team.