Galleria Raffaella Cortese presents the fourth chapter of its collaboration with Anna Maria Maiolino, which completes the exhibition of the various expressions of her work in Italy. In the previous shows held in 2010, 2015, and 2019, the gallery showcased her practice through videos, photographs, and sculptures. Through an array of mediums Maiolino explores the fundamental themes of Brazilian history and their relation to issues of political, civil, personal, and expressive freedom that are vital not only for Brazil but for the evolution of the international cultural landscape since the 1960s and 1970s.
Ações Matéricas gives an insight into Anna Maria Maiolino’s pictorial production for the first time in the gallery. Presented in via A. Stradella 1, these paintings bear witness to the performative dimension of Maiolino’s practice, built on bodily movements and action, encompassing the artist’s intense decennial research. Created with acrylic tempera on paper or canvas, these works attest...to the four essential aspects of the artist’s work: space, time, movement, and body.
The creative process is connected to the spatiality of the support on which the paint is poured. The inclination of the canvas determines the color’s movement on its surface, guided by the gravitational force. Additionally, time influences how the paint slides over the area, affecting its density and flow. The final outcome is the result of the interaction between the unpredictable, abstract movement of the color led by the force of gravity, and the artist’s active intervention, piloting the color. This mechanical displacement of matter within a field of forces combines with the heat of the body and the willpower of the artist.
Hence, four open and growing series of pictorial works are born: Ações Matéricas and Propícios, on canvas, and Codificações Matéricas and Novas Codificações, on paper. The artist’s body is at the core of these artworks, guiding their creation, directing the trail that the color leaves by sliding towards unexpected directions. The repetitive aspect of these series is not intended to provide a reliable means of achieving a pre-defined end result, but rather a genuine exchange of energy within the flow of time as the foundation of change and movement, which ensures the generation of difference.
BIOGRAPHY
Anna Maria Maiolino was born in Scalea, Italy, in 1942.
She lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.
Drawing from the everyday female consciousness and from an oppressive, censorial dictatorship – as experienced in 1970s and 1980s Brazil – Italian-born Anna Maria Maiolino has produced works steeped in vital force, in a wide range of languages and media throughout her artistic career: from performance to sculpture, from videos to photography, installation and drawing.
Maiolino was involved in Brazil’s 1960s New Figuration movement: her representational prints and drawings from these years were acts of resistance to the national military regime, rising urban inequalities, and culturally ingrained patriarchy. She would later cultivate an interest in spatial and existential issues with a shift towards Minimalism and Conceptualism, creating installations that coaxed interaction between viewer and object. Since 1989, Maiolino has started working with clay, crafting impermanent labor-intensive installations that foreground her physical handling of the material, references to the unconscious and recurrent gestures of everyday life.
Maiolino’s works are based on processes of creation necessarily paired with destruction, and almost constantly on matters of identity, from the subjective and universal point of view. Developing a dialogue between opposing and complementary categories, her artistic practice dissolves between dichotomies between the inside and the outside, between emptiness and matter, ancient and contemporary.
Maiolino has presented solo shows in numerous international institutions, among which: MALBA Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2022); Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo (2022); Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel (2021); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2020); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan (2019); MOCA, Los Angeles (2017); Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2014); Malmo Kunsthalle (2011); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea, Santiago de Compostela (2011); Fundació Antoní Tàpies, Barcelona (2010); Camden Arts Centre, London (2010); Pharos Centre for Contemporary art, Cipro (2007).
Recent group shows include: Chosen Memories, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2023 senzamargine – Passages in Italian Art at the Turn of the Millennium, MAXXI, Rome (2020-22); Pop América, 1965–1975, Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, North Carolina (2019); A Tale of Two Worlds, Museum of Modern Art Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires (2018); Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); Delirious: Art at the Limits of Reason, The Met Breuer, New York (2017); Acervo em Transformação and Histórias da Infáncia, MASP, São Paulo (2016); La Grande Madre, Palazzo Reale, Milan (2015); The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern, London (2015).
Maiolino took part to several international biennials such as: La Biennale de Lyon (2017), 10th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju (2014) and Documenta 13, Kassel (2012).
Entrada actualizada el el 17 jul de 2023
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