Anna Maria Maiolino: Territories of Immanence

Miami Art Central, March 24 – June 18, 2006

Anna Maria Maiolino: Territories of Immanence is the first retrospective exhibition of the artist in the United States. One of the most influential figures of her generation working in Brazil, Maiolino has consistently sought to connect art and life—structuring her work around fundamental experiences of language, the body, and subjectivity. Her practice dissolves the boundaries between media and objecthood, engaging with the idea that language and identity are always in flux.  Rooted in a dialogue between opposing yet complementary forces—inner and outer, self and other, void and matter, ancestral and contemporary—Maiolino’s work embraces incompleteness and process over finality.

Spanning drawing, painting, sculpture, prints, artists’ books, film, video, installation, and performance, her work privileges the immanence of the artistic act over the permanence of the art object. Her early experiments connect her to pivotal moments in Brazilian art history, including New Figuration, neo-Concretism, and New Brazilian Objectivity. She was also associated with the European neo-avant-garde, especially in Italy, and engaged with Minimalism and Conceptualism during her time in the United States.

Born in Calabria, Italy, in 1942, Maiolino immigrated with her family to South America in 1954, living first in Venezuela before settling in Rio de Janeiro in 1960. The instability and dislocation of her early life permeate her artistic methods. Her work frequently invokes themes of sustenance—both physical and spiritual—and is shaped by narratives of the self, labor, language, and the feminine. These narratives unfold through repeated bodily gestures, creating poetic connections between people, time, and processes. They speak to the making and remaking of identity through art and relational experience.

In the 1960s, Maiolino was part of the New Figuration movement and participated in the landmark exhibition New Brazilian Objectivity (1967), organized by Hélio Oiticica. Her prints and paintings from this period served both as resistance to Brazil’s military regime and as commentary on urban inequality and gender roles. Some of these works draw on literatura de cordel (string literature), a popular woodcut-based tradition from northeastern Brazil that narrates everyday life in poetic form.

In 1968, Maiolino moved to New York and transitioned toward Minimalism and Conceptualism. Upon returning to Brazil in the early 1970s, she began to experiment with spatial and existential concerns through drawings and paper objects. Key works from this era include Mental Maps (1971–74), Constructed Projects (1972), Print Objects (1971–72), Drawing Objects (1971–76), and the Book Objects series (1971–76). From the mid-1970s through the 1980s, she expanded her practice into installations, Super 8 films, and performative works, encouraging viewer interaction and participation.

After relocating to Rio de Janeiro from Buenos Aires in 1989, Maiolino began working extensively with clay. Her embrace of this elemental material emphasizes gesture, repetition, and process. These hand-molded, serially produced forms—each imprinted with the artist’s touch—capture the memory of action and suggest the regenerative potential of the subject through embodied making. These sculptural installations, such as In Many(1991–95), evoke primal acts: the forming of language, the shaping of food, the rhythm of breath, and the continuity of labor. The repeated gestures accumulate into visceral expressions of time, memory, and the cyclical nature of life.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Anna Maria Maiolino was born in Italy in 1942 and has been a Brazilian citizen since 1968. She studied at the Escuela Nacional Cristóbal Rojas (Caracas), the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes (Rio de Janeiro), and the Pratt Graphics Center (New York). Her work has been widely exhibited internationally, including in Tropicália: A Revolution in Brazilian Culture (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2005); Entre Outros / Territories of Immanence: A Retrospective (Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo, 2005); The Object Sculpture (Henry Moore Institute, 2002); Virgin Territory: Women, Gender, and History in Contemporary Brazilian Art (National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., 2001); Vida Afora / A Life Line (The Drawing Center, New York, 2001); N Vezes Um / N Times One (Art in General, New York, 2001); Beyond Perceptions: The Sixties Experiment (Independent Curators International, 2000); Re-Aligning Vision (El Museo del Barrio, New York, 1997); Inside the Visible (Kanaal Art Foundation, Belgium, and ICA Boston, 1995); and America, Bride of the Sun (Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, 1992).

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Anna Maria Maiolino. Eu, from the series Mapas Mentais (1971). Collection Veronica Maiolino Gerhm

Anna Maria Maiolino: Territories of Immanence is co-organized by Miami Art Central and the Pinacoteca do Estado, São Paulo. Curated by Rina Carvajal and Paulo Venancio Filho, the exhibition features 175 works spanning from the 1960s to the present, offering long-overdue recognition of Maiolino’s pivotal contributions. The Miami Art Central presentation is generously sponsored by the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation. Additional support is provided by the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners, and the Cowles Charitable Trust. Special thanks to TAM Brazilian Airlines for its support.