Anna Maria Maiolino Biography

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, performance, installation and sculpture - Maiolino relentlessly explores notions of subjectivity and self.

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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 passage from Italian to Portuguese, 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.

Text courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

Anna Maria Maiolino
featured artworks

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Untitled, from Hilomorfos (Hylomorphs) series by Anna Maria Maiolino contemporary artwork sculpture
Anna Maria Maiolino Untitled, from Hilomorfos (Hylomorphs) series, 2016 Brass
60 x 60 x 100 cm
Hauser & Wirth
Untitled, from the series Ovóides by Anna Maria Maiolino contemporary artwork painting, works on paper
Anna Maria Maiolino Untitled, from the series Ovóides, 2019 Acrylic paint on paper
103 x 74 x 4 cm
Luisa Strina Request Price & Availability
Na Tábua [In the Board] by Anna Maria Maiolino contemporary artwork sculpture
Anna Maria Maiolino Na Tábua [In the Board], 1993 Moulded cement
40.5 x 47 x 7 cm
Richard Saltoun Gallery Request Price & Availability
Untitled, from Cobrinhas (Little Snakes) series by Anna Maria Maiolino contemporary artwork sculpture
Anna Maria Maiolino Untitled, from Cobrinhas (Little Snakes) series, 2018 Marble powder and white cement
44 x 70 x 10 cm
Hauser & Wirth Request Price & Availability
In the Board by Anna Maria Maiolino contemporary artwork sculpture
Anna Maria Maiolino In the Board, 1993 Moulded cement
41 x 46 x 6 cm
Richard Saltoun Gallery Request Price & Availability
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Anna Maria Maiolino
recent exhibitions

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Represented by these
Ocula Member Galleries

Hauser & Wirth contemporary art gallery in Hong Kong
Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris +8
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Anna Maria Maiolino in
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