Anna Maria Maiolino

Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, Italy, 1942). Printmaker, painter, sculptor, multimedia artist and designer. Moves in 1954, due to postwar shortages, to Caracas, Venezuela, where she studies at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas from 1958 to 1960, the year she moves to Brazil. In 1961, he began a course in wood engraving at the National School of Fine Arts (Enba) in Rio de Janeiro, and joined the New Figuration movement, a reaction to abstraction and a stance on the Brazilian political moment. He attended the studio of Ivan Serpa (1923-1973) at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ), and studied engraving with Adir Botelho (1932) in 1963. The following year he holds his first solo exhibition at Galeria G, in Caracas. In 1967 he takes part in the Nova Objetividade Brasileira, an exhibition that, among other precepts, proposed the overcoming of the easel picture in favor of the object, and was organized by critics and artists, including Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980). Between 1968 and 1971, he studied at the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. From the 1970s on, he began to work with various media, such as installation, photography and film. She participates, in Curitiba, in the 1st Super-8 Film Festival, awarded with the film In-Out, Antropofagia, her first work in video. She also participates in the Super-8 International Film Festival, at Space Cardin, in Paris; in the 5th Brazilian Short Film Journey, in Salvador; and in the 2nd National Short Film Festival, at Alliance Française du Brésil, in Rio de Janeiro. At the end of the 1970s, the artist began to dedicate herself to performances. In 1978, she performed Mitos Vadios (Stray Myths), in a vacant lot on Rua Augusta, in São Paulo, and, in 1981, on Rua Cardoso Júnior, in Entrevidas, where dozens of chicken eggs were scattered on the ground so that the audience would have to go through a "minefield. In the 1980s, he began working with clay under the influence of Argentinian artist Victor Grippo (1936-2002). In 1990, he was awarded the prize for best show of the year by the Brazilian Association of Art Critics (ABCA) for his solo exhibition held in 1989 at the Cândido Mendes Cultural Center (CCCM). In 2002, he held a retrospective exhibition in New York, accompanied by the book A Life Line/Vida Afora.

Por: Sala Rússia