Anna Maria Maiolino

Untitled, from “Ações Matéricas” series, 1999
Acrylic ink on canvas Diptych
Collection Miami Art Museum, anonymous gift.

Anna Maria Maiolino, is one of the most important artists of her generation working in Brazil. Her work seeks to connect art and life, to give structure to primordial experiences of language, self and the body. Her early artistic experiments connect her to key moments of Brazilian Art history. At the beginning of the 1960s, Maiolino was part of the New Figuration movement. In 1967 she took part in the exhibition New Brazilian Objetivity organized by Hélio Oiticica. Her work from these years, primarily prints and paintings, confronted Brazil’s military regime, urban inequalities and the role of women in a patriarchal society.

After Maiolino moved to New York in 1968, she shifted away from representation toward Minimalism and Conceptualism. Returning to Brazil during the early 1970s, she began to experiment with drawing and objects made of paper, exploring issues that connect her work to the period’s neo-Concrete practices. From the mid-1970s through the 1980s she created installations, films, paintings, drawings and projects that encouraged interaction between the audience and art.

In 1989 Maiolino began to work with clay. Since then she has continued to explore this basic material, relying on traditional labor-intensive processes such as modeling, mold making, and casting. Anna Maria Maiolino was featured in the 1999 Realigning Vision: Alternative Currents in South American Drawing at MAM and in a one-person survey exhibition curated by Rina Carvajal at Miami Art Central in 2006. She will be subject of a traveling retrospective exhibition, Sine Die organized by The Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, (Spring 2009).