Anna Maria Maiolino

Early Life

Anna Mario Maiolino (b. 1942) is one of the most significant Italian-Brazilian artist that works in Brazil today . Anna Maria was born in Calabria, Italy, to an Italian father and Ecuadorian mother. In 1954 her family immigrated to Venezuela, where she later attended Escola Nacional Cristobal Rojas in 1958. In 1960 she and her family moved to Rio de Janerio, Brazil, where she attended painting and woodcut courses at Escola Nacional de Belas Artes where she met artists Antonio Dias and Rubens Gerchman, who she would later participate in the early Brazilian art movements with.

Art Movement Involvement

When Anna Maria was 18 she became involved in the early Brazilian art movements of the 1960s and 70s. Such movements included the Neo-Concretism movement, the New Configuration movement, and the New Brazilian Objectivity movement in 1967, which shifted the view of production of Brazilian art. During her involvement in the Brazilian Objectivity movement she worked along side respected Brazilian artists such as Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape . During these years her paintings were signified as a resistance to the Brazilian military regime, as well as the countries growing urban inequalities .

Art Work

In 1967 she showed her first solo exhibiton of her woodcuts at the Goeldi gallery. Maiolino became a Brazilian citizen and then moved to New York in 1968 and focused her art more on Minimalism and Conceptualism, creating works that influenced interaction between the object and viewer. In mid-1971 she was granted a scholarship to attend the International Graphic Center Workshop, by Pratt University. After returning to Brazil in 1971 she began to use drawing as a mean of self-expression. She worked to define herself as an artist and individual and started a series of works on paper, with an emphasis on the gesture and action on the process of making. Some of her work from those years include Mental Maps (1971-74), Book Objects (1971-76), and Drawing Objects (1971-76). From the mid-70s and up until the 80s she began working with Super 8 films, and other projects that encouraged performative interaction between the objects of art and audience. In 1989, Maiolino was granted the Mario Pedroas Prize for the best show of the year for her exhibition at the Pequena gallery by the Brazilian Association of Art Critics, and begins working with clay on the Modeled Earth series. She moved to Buenos Aires and began working primarily with clay in 1989 and since then 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 90s primarily focused 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 disourse 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 Sao Paulo Art Critics for her exhibition, "Um, Nenhum, Cem Mil ("One, None, One Hundred Thousand") and was apart 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

Today Anna Maria continues to live and works in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In 2010 Ann Maria 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. One of the installations is 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).