Anna Maria Maiolino | Errância Poética (Poetic Wanderings)

About

For over five decades, Maiolino has drawn from her personal history as an artist, migrant, and mother, to produce works that relentlessly challenge accepted notions of desire, language, and sexuality while celebrating the viscerality of embodied experience. On view from 14 November through 22 December 2018, the exhibition highlights multiple dimensions within Maiolino’s oeuvre, presenting more than fifty of the artist’s sculptures, drawings, paintings, photographs, and videos, as well as a new site-specific installation that continues her iconic Terra Modelada (Modeled Earth) series.

Maiolino’s formative migration from post-war Southern Italy to a politically unstable South America, as well as her linguistic passage from Italian to Spanish then to Portuguese, has engendered an enduring fascination with questions of identity. Her work immerses itself in a range of themes, from cultural and linguistic displacement, to deprivation and sustenance, to everyday domestic rituals. The open-ended nature of Maiolino’s practice enables self-described ‘poetic wanderings,’ as she works freely across media and disciplines. Evolving in a spiral rather than linear succession, Maiolino’s art is one that offers a new language for the often precarious realm of daily human existence.