Anna Maria Maiolino

About

Maiolino was born in Italy in 1942 and emigrated with her family to Venezuela as a teenager. In 1960 she moved to Brazil to attend the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, where she began to develop a body of work in dialogue with abstraction, minimalism, and conceptualism. Her work was profoundly influenced by the aftermath of the Second World War, the military dictatorship in Brazil, and her experience as an artist during the period when what could be called art changed dramatically. The exhibition will cover Maiolino’s entire career, from the 1960s until the present, bringing together early experimental prints, drawings, films, performances, and installations, including her recent large-scale ephemeral installations made with unfired, hand-rolled clay. Maiolino’s work is uniquely capable of tracing the course of the movements that define Brazilian art history, channeled via a personal, psychologically charged practice that charts her own introspective path as much as it opens on to large philosophical questions of repetition and difference, the transient and the permanent, and aesthetic problems such as solid and void and the intimate relationship between drawing and sculpture.