NEW YORK, NY.- For more than six decades, Anna Maria Maiolino has pursued an expansive artistic practice shaped by her experiences of migration, motherhood and the complexities of daily life. Constantly reinventing her visual language, she has used drawing, photography, sculpture, performance and installation to plumb questions of corporeal existence, memory and the fundamental condition of being human. This September, Hauser & Wirth presents ‘ANNA—And the Infinite Line,’ an exhibition celebrating the acclaimed Brazilian artist’s enduring practice and the release of a documentary of the same title from The Forgotten Her Story.
Spanning sixty years, the exhibition unfolds in three chapters and includes early prints and works on paper from the 1960s and 1970s, photography from the late 1970s through the 1980s, and sculpture from 1990 to the present.
‘ANNA—And the Infinite Line’ opens with works that trace Maiolino’s early efforts to articulate her identity through art, beginning with her figurative works. Among these is the starkly contrasting woodcut Anna (1967), a self-portrait that replaces the artist’s image with the letters of her name, exploring the tensions between language, representation and the self. Following her move from Rio de Janeiro to New York in 1968, Maiolino continued to work in a largely figurative vein, producing the spare, diaristic drawings of Entre Pausas (Between Pauses), which she has described as ‘records of existence,’ made while adapting to life in the United States. After her return to Brazil in 1971, she embraced increasingly experimental approaches to drawing and sculpture, as seen in the series Desenho Objeto (Drawing Object), in which thread and paper become bodily forms that evoke universal acts of release, transformation and renewal.
Upon resettling in Brazil, Maiolino found herself living under a brutal military dictatorship, whose increasingly repressive political climate shaped her first experiments with photography. In her Fotopoemação (Photo-poem-action) works, images of the mundane, the violent and the absurd reflect the realities of life under authoritarian rule, where speech is closely policed and everyday activities become charged with political meaning. Later additions to the series, subtitled Vida Afora (A Life Line), respond to Brazil’s gradual return to democracy with a sense of cautious optimism. Here, the egg emerges as a recurring motif in Maiolino’s practice, embodying both fragility and resilience.
Maiolino began working with clay in 1989, delving into a material that ‘provoked a storm’ within her, she has said, and transformed her existing visual language into a sculptural practice grounded in repetition. In works such as ‘São 8 (There Are 8)’ (1993) and ‘Cobrinhas (Little Snakes)’ (2018), Maiolino builds simple coiled forms through rhythmic, ritual-like gestures that recall such quotidian acts as preparing food. Through the tactic of repetition, Maiolino pursues what she has described as ‘the big and transcendental things: the search for totality and the infinite through repetition and seriality.’ Sculptures from her Híbridos (Hybrid) series similarly foreground process, incorporating the mold used during casting into the final object, emphasizing negative space and dissolving the boundary between the act of making and the work itself.
Throughout her career, the artist has emphasized that her works, regardless of medium or subject, are completed in the presence of the viewer. Returning to drawing, a practice deeply dear to her, Maiolino creates the drawing series ‘Na Noite - No Escuro (At Night - In the Dark)’ using white permanent marker on black paper. If in the sculptures ‘the spectator and I share the vital gestures of work that have been common to all since the dawn of humanity,’ as the artist says, here she seeks to expand the sense of mystery.
About the artist
Anna Maria Maiolino is one of the most significant artists working in Brazil today. Born 1942 in Italy, Maiolino’s practice expresses a concern with creative and destructive processes. Working across a wide range of disciplines and mediums—spanning drawing, printmaking, poetry, film/video, sound, performance, installation and sculpture—Maiolino relentlessly explores notions of subjectivity and self.
Through fragmentation and abstraction, Maiolino’s surfaces are rich with metaphor, alluding to and questioning language, sexuality, desire and the unconscious. The artist’s deeply formative migration from post-war Southern Italy to a politically unstable South America, and her linguistic transition from Italian to Spanish upon arriving in Venezuela at six years old, and subsequently to Portuguese when relocating with her family to Rio de Janeiro at eighteen, engendered an enduring fascination with identity. Maiolino has perfected a dialogue between opposite yet complementary categories in a practice that dissolves dichotomies of inner and outer, self and other. Hers is an art in search of a new language for the liminal realm of daily human existence.
Shadowed by the turmoil and governance of military repression, Maiolino’s early experiments in the 1960s connected her to important movements in Brazilian art history such as new figuration and new objectivity. Maiolino took part in the radical reconfiguring of the art object—and thus the art institution and the artist—during this period. Along with Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, Maiolino participated in the 1967 exhibition, ‘New Brazilian Objectivity,’ which symbolized a cultural shift in previous constructivist traditions and established a new vision for the production of art in Brazil.
Since the early 1980s Maiolino has worked with malleable materials that, through her handling, come to bear the imprint of unconscious gestures, daily rituals and sensory expressions of being. Her mark-making is based on the repetition of basic actions that are recorded in the material; her forms the result of this laborious processing of raw material, like the basic bodily functions of eating and defecating. Hers is a work of liberation: abstraction is freed from the more repressed and puritanical precepts of minimalism and brought back into the service of the active, desiring body.
