Galeria Inox

Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, Italy, 1942). Printmaker, painter, sculptor, multimedia artist, and draftsperson. In 1954, due to post-war scarcity, she moved to Caracas, Venezuela, where she studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas from 1958 to 1960, the year she relocated to Brazil. In 1961, she began a woodcut printmaking course at the National School of Fine Arts (Enba) in Rio de Janeiro and joined “Nova Figuração” (New Figuration), a movement reacting against abstraction while taking a stance on the Brazilian political climate. She attended Ivan Serpa’s (1923–1973) studio at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (MAM/RJ) and studied printmaking under Adir Botelho (1932) in 1963. The following year, she held her first solo exhibition at Galeria G in Caracas. In 1967, she participated in “Nova Objetividade Brasileira” (New Brazilian Objectivity), an exhibition organized by critics and artists—including Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) that, among other precepts, proposed moving beyond easel painting in favor of the object.

Between 1968 and 1971, she studied at the Pratt Graphic Center in New York. Starting in the 1970s, she began working across diverse media, including installation, photography, and film. In Curitiba, she took part in the 1st Super-8 Film Festival, winning an award for “In-Out Antropofagia”, her first video work. She also participated in the International Super-8 Film Festival at Espace Cardin in Paris; the 5th Brazilian Short Film Conference in Salvador; and the 2nd National Short Film Festival at the Alliance Française du Brésil in Rio de Janeiro. In the late 1970s, she turned her focus to performance art. In 1978, she staged “Mitos Vadios” (Wandering Myths) in a vacant lot on Rua Augusta in São Paulo, and in 1981, on Rua Cardoso Júnior, “Entrevidas” (Between Lives), in which dozens of chicken eggs were scattered across the ground, requiring the public to navigate a “minefield.” In the 1980s, she began working with clay under the influence of Argentine artist Víctor Grippo (1936–2002). In 1990, she received the Best Exhibition of the Year award from the Brazilian Association of Art Critics (ABCA) for her 1989 solo show at the Cândido Mendes Cultural Center (CCCM). In 2002, she held a retrospective exhibition in New York accompanied by the book “A Life Line / Vida Afora”.