Anna Maria Maiolino
In the sky I am one and many and as a human I am everything and nothing
11.6. —
26.9.2021
Anna Maria Maiolino (b. 1942) is one of the most significant women artists working in Brazil today. The Italian-born Brazilian artist’s first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland will feature a selection of her early videos, films, photographs, sculptures, drawings and texts, spanning a narrative arc through her artistic work and life from the 1970s to the present. The exhibition brings together a selection of works from the past fifty years. Her oeuvre encompasses a wide range of disciplines and media while managing to develop a strong poetic language in each. In it, she explores her identity as a woman, a woman artist, and an immigrant, especially under the military dictatorship in Brazil from the 1960s until the 1980s. As her work has influenced generations of artists all over the world, reconsidering it today is a great opportunity for opening up new perspectives on life and living together. The work confronts us with the power of the artist’s imagination and her own sensibility towards human conditions, but also her acute awareness of social and cultural deficiencies in daily life.
Maiolino has participated in numerous international exhibitions. More recent solo exhibitions of her long artistic work include Por um fio (By a Thread), SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, US; Anna Maria Maiolino. O amor se faz revolucionário, PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, IT; Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary, Whitechapel Gallery, London, GB; Em Tudo - Todo, Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, BR; Errância Poética, Hauser & Wirth, New York, US; Anna Maria Maiolino, The Museum of Contemporary Art - MOCA, Los Angeles, US; Matrix 252, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, University of California, Berkeley, US; Affections. Premio MASP Mercedes-Benz, MASP, São Paulo, BR; and the Retrospective itinerant exhibition, which took place at Malmö Kunsthalle, Malmö, SE; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela and Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, ES.
She also organized several performances such as AL DI LÀ DI, PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan, IT (2019), and In Atto, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan, IT (2015), and was awarded several prizes including the MASP Mercedes-Benz Prize of Visual Arts, São Paulo, BR (2015).
A comprehensive interview with the artist and Ines Goldbach was published on the occasion of the exhibition.