ART CITIES:N. York-Anna Maria Maiolino

Anna Maria Maiolino is one of the most significant artists working in Brazil today. Her 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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

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. the exhibition “ANNA—And the Infinite Line” celebrates her 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. The exhibition  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.

Photo: Anna Maria Maiolino, Untitled, from Cobrinhas (Little Snakes) series, 2018, Marble powder and white cement, 44 x 70 x 10 cm / 17 3/8 x 27 1/2 x 3 7/8 in, © Anna Maria Maiolino, Photo: Sarah Muehlbauer, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 443 West 18th Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 10/9-31/10/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/