How can I store nested lists in Postgres in way that’s easy to use them in my Python program later?

I plan to write the lists to the database once and reuse them many times. I’ve been able to store the nested lists as a string but it’s not optimal, I’m trying to accomplish this with as little post-processing as possible so I’d rather do more up-front work for speed/ease of use on retrieval later.

These nested lists are for layout purposes, not poor data normalization.

Here is what I’ve tried based off here:

Created table in my database with field that supports ARRAY (I’m using DBeaver, the annotation for ARRAY is the underscore before text: _text)

CREATE TABLE public.layout (
    f_id int8 NULL,
    layout _text NULL
);

When trying this:

insert into mpl_layout (f_id, layout)
values (7, ARRAY[["list_1"],["list_2"],["list_3"],["list_4"]]);

I get an error:

SQL Error [42703]: ERROR: column “list_1” does not exist

Adding parentheses around the ARRAY arguments only changes the error message:

insert into mpl_layout (f_id, layout)
values (7, ARRAY([["list_1"],["list_2"],["list_3"],["list_4"]]));

SQL Error [42601]: ERROR: syntax error at or near “7”

I tried the curly brace '{}' format:

insert into mpl_mosaic_layout (figure_id, layout)
values (7, '{[["list_1"],["list_2"],["list_3"],["list_4"]]}');

And got this error:

SQL Error [22P02]: ERROR: malformed array literal:
“{[[“list_1”],[“list_2”],[“list_3”],[“list_4″]]}” Detail: Unexpected
array element.

What should I try next?