Anna Maria Maiolino (born May 20, 1942) is a Brazilian

contemporary art Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic co ...

ist.

Early life

Maiolino was born in Scalea, in Calabria in southern Italy, to an Italian father and Ecuadorian mother. In 1954, her family emigrated to Venezuela, where she later attended Escola Nacional Cristobal Rojas in 1958. In 1960, she and her family moved to

Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a ...

, Brazil. Here, she attended painting and woodcut courses at

Escola Nacional de Belas Artes Escola de Belas Artes (School of Fine Arts) is one of the centers of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and dates back to colonial times. A royal letter of Nov 20 1800 by John VI of Portugal established the ''Aula Prática de Desenho e Fig ...

where she met artists Antonio Dias and

Rubens Gerchman Rubens Gerchman (January 10, 1942 in Rio de Janeiro – January 29, 2008) was a Brazilian painter and sculptor. He was heavily influenced by concrete and neoconcrete art. Many of Gerchman's works are paintings based on populist themes and h ...

, with whom she would later participate in the early Brazilian art movements.

Art Movement Involvement

When Maiolino was 18, she became involved in the early Brazilian art movements of the 1960s and 1970s; this included the New Configuration, Neo-Concretism, and the New Brazilian Objectivity movement in 1967, which shifted the nature of Brazilian art. While she was involved with the Brazilian Objectivity movement, she worked with many respected Brazilian artists, including

Lygia Clark Lygia Pimentel Lins (23 October 1920 – 25 April 1988), better known as Lygia Clark, was a Brazilian artist best known for her painting and installation work. She was often associated with the Brazilian Constructivist movements of the mid-2 ...

and

Lygia Pape Lygia Pape (7 April 1927 – 3 May 2004) was a Brazilian visual artist, sculptor, engraver, and filmmaker, who was a key figure in the Concrete movement and a later co-founder of the Neo-Concrete Movement in Brazil during the 1950s and 196 ...

. During these years her paintings were viewed as resistances to the Brazilian military regime, as well as the country's growing urban inequalities.

Works

Maiolino showed her first solo exhibition of her woodcuts in 1967 at the Goeldi gallery. After becoming a Brazilian citizen, she moved to New York in 1968 to focus more on Minimalism and

Conceptualism In metaphysics, conceptualism is a theory that explains universality of particulars as conceptualized frameworks situated within the thinking mind. Intermediate between nominalism and realism, the conceptualist view approaches the metaphysical co ...

artwork; during this time she created works that influenced interaction between the object and the viewer. In mid-1971 she was granted a scholarship to attend the International Graphic Center Workshop at Pratt University because of the recommendation of Luis Camnitzer. While in New York, she turned to poetry as her primary mode of expression. After returning to Brazil in late 1971, she began to create drawings and text based compositions. Some of her work from those years include ''Mapas Mentais'' (Mental Maps) (1971–74), ''Book Objects'' (1971-76), and ''Drawing Objects'' (1971–76). From the mid-1970s and up until the 1980s she began working with Super 8 films, and other projects that encouraged performative interaction between the objects of art and audience. In 1989, she was granted the Mário Pedrosa Prize by the Brazilian Association of Art Critics for the best show of the year for her exhibition at the Pequena gallery, and began working with clay on the Modeled Earth series. In 1989, she began to use clay, cement, and plaster to sculpt wall-mounted sculptures. After this move, she has continued to explore the material through creating labor-intensive processes such as modeling, molding, and casting in references to recurrent gestures through a series of installations. Maiolino's drawings from the 1990s focused primarily on similar methods from her earlier exploration of materials and media. When she works with paper it becomes more than a drawing surface, but matter and body, which is visible in her 2006 drawing 'Untitled', which captures the poetic discourse that she is able to use through a simple gesture. In 1994 Maiolino received the "Os Melhores de 1993-Pesquisa de Linguagem (The best of 1993- Language research)" prize from the Association of São Paulo Art Critics for her exhibition, "Um, Nenhum, Cem Mil ("One, None, One Hundred Thousand") and was a part of the 1996 show of 20th century Women Artists: "Inside the Visible". In 2001, The Drawing center published a catalog entitled- A Life Line, and that same year her works were included in the MoMA collection.

Recent works

Maiolino now lives and works in

São Paulo, Brazil SAO or Sao may refer to: Places * Sao civilisation, in Middle Africa from 6th century BC to 16th century AD * Sao, a town in Boussé Department, Burkina Faso * Saco Transportation Center (station code SAO), a train station in Saco, Maine, U.S. ...

. In 2010, Maiolino had different art works from the past 30 years of her career displayed in an exhibition ('Continuum') at the Camden Arts Centre in

London, England London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a major s ...

. One of the installations, made entirely from clay, is a symbol of everyday tasks, the individual, language and society. She created the piece by hand, rolling and molding the clay into 100 different shapes. More recent solo exhibitions include 'The Matrix 252', which is a selection of videos that use the body to express life when ruled by an oppressive government and 'Affections' (2014). In 2012, she participated in Documenta 13 (Kassel, Germany) with the work ''Here & There'', a site specific installation from the ''Modeled Earth'' series, composed of clay, sounds and plants. The same year, she won the MASP Mercedes-Benz Prize for Visual Arts 2012 for Best Contemporary Artist of the Year, which granted her a solo exhibition at MASP.

Publications

* ''Anna Maria Maiolino'', M Catherine de Zegher; Drawing Center (New York, N.Y.); Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo.; Paço Imperial do Rio de Janeiro New York : Drawing Center, 2002. * ''Anna Maria Maiolino : order and subjectivity'', Asbury, Michael. Nicosia, Cyprus : Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art, 2009.

References

External links

Anna Maria Maiolino in the collection of The Museum of Modern Art

MoMA Audio about Desde A até M (From A to M), 1972-1999, Buraco Preto (Black Hole), 1974, Trajetóraia I, 1976, Trajetóraia II, 1976, Untitled, 2000, Untitled, 2001Interview with the artist Anna Maria Maiolino, included in the World Goes Pop exhibition at Tate Modern September 2015Anna Maria Maiolino - Hauser and Wirth Gallery
{{DEFAULTSORT:Maiolino, Anna Marie 1942 births Living people People from the Province of Cosenza Brazilian contemporary artists Brazilian people of Ecuadorian descent Italian emigrants to Brazil Italian people of Ecuadorian descent