For more than six decades, Anna Maria Maiolino’s (Scalea, Italy, 1942) practice has embraced a wide range of media—drawing, sculpture, printmaking, video, installation, performance, and poetry—in a constant search for new forms of expression. The body, language, desire, and subjectivity are treated as territories of experimentation, where the personal merges with the political and the intimate opens onto the collective.
The experience of migration—from southern Italy to Venezuela, where she studied at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas in Caracas between 1958 and 1960, and ultimately to Brazil—plays a central role in her artistic inquiry, shaping a sensitivity to issues of identity, belonging, and memory. In the early 1960s, in Rio de Janeiro, she studied woodcut printmaking at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes and also attended Ivan Serpa’s studio. Over the course of that decade, her research aligned with major Brazilian art movements such as Nova Figuração and Nova Objetividade, both of which offered critical revisions of artistic languages amid the country’s political and social tensions under the civil-military dictatorship. Alongside figures like Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Hélio Oiticica, she took part in the iconic Nova Objetividade Brasileira exhibition (1967), affirming her role in debates on the social function of art. Between 1968 and 1971, she studied at the International Pratt Graphic Center in New York, where she experimented with metal engraving and gradually moved away from figuration.
From the 1980s onward, Maiolino began to explore intensely the relationship between gesture and matter, working with materials such as clay, plaster, and modeling compounds. In her hands, these materials record repetitive and intuitive actions that evoke primordial bodily processes such as eating or breathing. From these gestures emerge not only forms, but also rhythms, interruptions, and pauses that make visible the passage of time, fragility, and the pulse of life itself. Her work proposes a distinctive approach to abstraction, marked by an organic quality that breaks away from rigid formal conventions and opens itself to a tactile, affective, and existential experience of the world.
In 2024, Maiolino was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Bienalle for her lifetime body of work.
Among her recent solo exhibitions are: Je suis là. Estou aqui, Musée Picasso-Paris (2025); Psssiiiuuu…, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, and Fundación Malba, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2022); In the sky I am one and many and as a human I am everything and nothing, Kunsthaus Baselland, Muttenz, Switzerland (2021); By a Thread, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, USA (2020); IN ALL - WHOLE, Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2019); Love becomes revolutionary, PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy, and Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2019); Poetic Wandering, Hauser & Wirth, New York, USA (2018); Anna Maria Maiolino, MoCA, Los Angeles, USA (2017); Point to Point, Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2014); Anna Maria Maiolino. Matrix 252, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive - University of California, Berkeley, USA (2014); Affections: MASP Mercedes-Benz Prize, MASP, São Paulo (2012); Anna Maria Maiolino, Fundação Antoní Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, and Malmö Kunsthalle, Sweden (2010-2011).
She has participated in relevant national and international exhibitions, such as: Latin American Art from the Cisneros Gift in Dialogue, MoMA, New York, USA (2023); Scale: Sculpture 1945-2000, Fundación Juan March, Madrid, Spain (2023); Together. Interact, Interplay, Interfere, Kunst Meran, Merano, Italy (2022); This Must Be the Place, Americas Society, New York, USA (2021); The Lyric Machine, Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2021); Highlight, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro - MAM Rio (2020); Senzamargine. Passages in Italian Art at the Turn of the Millennium, MAXXI - Museo Nazionale Delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome, Italy (2020); The years we lived in danger, Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo – MAM-SP (2019); Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA, and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2017-2018); Art and Space, Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain (2017); Histories of Childhood, MASP, São Paulo (2016); The EY Exhibition. The World Goes Pop, Tate Modern, London, UK (2015).
She has participated in the 60th Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere, Italy (2024); 14th Lyon Biennale: Floating Worlds, France (2017); 20th Milan Triennial: Art & Food. Rituals since 1851, Italy (2015); 10th Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2014); 30th São Paulo Biennale, São Paulo Biennale Foundation (2013); documenta 13: Here & There, Kassel, Germany (2012); 29th São Paulo Biennale: There is always a sea for a man to sail (2010).
Appointed Honorary Doctor in 2022 by the University of the Arts London, UK, Maiolino has been awarded several prizes throughout her career, such as Clarival do Prado Valladares Prize (Artist for trajectory), ABCA – Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte (2018); MASP Mercedes-Benz Prize (2012); APCA – Associação Paulista de Críticos de Artes Prize (1994); among others.
Her work is part of important collections around the world, among which stand out MoMA, New York, USA; Tate Modern; London, UK; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; MoCA, Los Angeles, USA; MASP, São Paulo; Fundación Malba, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain; Pinacoteca de São Paulo; and Galleria Nazionale di Roma, Italy.