Is 2024 the year Brazilian art is attached to the international art scene for good? We of the Brazilian visual arts’ community hope so. The curator of São Paulo’s MASP Museum, Adriano Pedrosa, certainly plays a substantial role in the effort to upgrade the local visual arts scene since he was appointed curator of the sixtieth Venice Biennale. Another major event in Brazil’s artistic boost is that the biennial’s Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement has been awarded to Italo-Brazilian conceptual artist Anna Maria Maiolino, eighty-one, the first living Brazilian woman graced with the art world’s “Oscar.” The Golden Lion prize will also be given to another major artist, Turkish contemporary feminist artist Nil Yalter, eighty-six. Only now in their advanced age are both women being internationally recognized for their sublime artwork. Founded 129 years ago, it took over a century for the male-centered Biennale to honor exceptional women artists from marginal cultures.

Before Maiolino’s awards ceremony and the opening of her Biennale exhibition on April 20, the artist’s work can be admired in her third solo show at São Paulo’s Galeria Luisa Strina through Saturday, March 16. The exhibition title “Querer e não querer, desejar e temer” [To want and not to want, to desire and to fear] nods to her concept of duality on the line of the bard’s soliloquy “To be or not to be.”

We invited two experts to expound on Maiolino’s oeuvre and explain the low-profile personality of this grand artist praised by other artists and sadly until now, not well known even among collectors in Brazil, where she has lived and worked since the early 1950s when she arrived as a poor young immigrant fleeing from Italy’s World War II-destroyed economy.

Director of São Paulo’s Instituto Tomie Ohtake (ITO) Ricardo Ohtake is a longtime friend of the artist through his mother, deceased artist Tomie Ohtake. In 2022, curated by Paulo Miyada, ITO held Maiolino’s largest anthological exhibition to date with an uncommon title, “psssiiiuuu…,” a common Portuguese onomatopoeia meaning attention, a whistle, a flirt, a secret or simply to hush, much like Maiolino’s silent, yet commanding, plural oeuvre.

Ricardo, tell us about how Maiolino began in the arts in Brazil.

Before moving here, Anna Maria lived with her family in Caracas, where she enrolled for two years at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, so when she arrived in Rio in 1960, she came with baggage full of ideas. It wasn’t long until she was participating in the most significant art exhibitions in Brazil and making her name in the contemporary arts.

What were the themes of her work then?

Her work is extremely consistent to this day, then and now. She has always been interested in searching for a way through art to convey the rich, but often tragic experiences she had in her personal life: cultural differences, language, war, poverty both in Italy and Latin America, totalitarianism and prejudice against the poor.

In general, how is her work perceived?

Her path to becoming a major name in the arts has been slow because, above all, she has always respected her own timing. However, now, aged eighty-one, she is finally at the top of the world of art after working very hard, always digging deeply into her own self-expression. All her long career she has lived between Rio and São Paulo as an outsider of the art market, with very few exhibitions, although her work is nothing but sublime.

To wrap up, tell us about the search into her own artistic expression. 

Anna Maria always digs deeper and deeper, be it with a simple graphite pencil, a charcoal, a crayon on paper, or producing serial photography, video, performance, painting, sculpture or creating engravings according to the teachings of Oswaldo Goeldi. She is also a writer and a great art companion always interested in conversations about the realm of art with her friend artists, exchanging authentic and unique artistic experiences.

Following is an interview with the artistic director of São Paulo’s Galeria Luisa Strina, Kiki Mazzucchelli.

Kiki, what should we have in mind when looking into the work of Anna Maria Maiolino?

Anna Maria Maiolino has a five-decade-long trajectory in the arts producing works in multiple supports from drawing, sculpture, photography, painting to video. Notwithstanding the longevity of her artistic activity, her oeuvre boasts enormous coherence. As a child, her family emigrated from their native Calabria, in the Italian south, to Caracas. Later, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, while living in periods between New York and Buenos Aires, before finally settling in São Paulo. Due to the constant geographical displacement, her oeuvre became imbued with a feeling of non-belonging. This sentiment is manifested in her use of verbal language, in the fragmentary character of her work and may appear in formal elements of her oeuvre, while seeming to refer to pre-language times or ancestral forms. Furthermore, Maiolino explores the concept of duality, such as, the positive and the negative, the full and the void, that appear in her tridimensional works on paper from the 1970s to more recent works. In a first reading it may seem that the works carry underlined meanings or may be understood through subtitles, the fact is this is a vast, experimental oeuvre that intersects different media and supports while forging its own language open to multiple interpretations.

Tell us about the artist’s solo show currently on view at Galeria Luisa Strina.

The exhibition shows the work she has produced since the early nineties till now. At the turn of the eighties to the nineties, Maiolino began to work with raw earth clay that later evolved to sculptural works in cement, plaster, ceramic or metal. The works on show were all selected by the artist herself and, despite her age, she masterminded the montage herself from beginning to end. More than highlighting one or another series, according to the artist, the show is focused on the idea of the point and the line, which are elements seen throughout the show in several series and in different supports. The pieces on view also reflect another significant characteristic in the artist’s work methodology: the idea of repetition and difference. I believe that in the show Anna highlights the individuality of the artist’s gesture through the drawings, all presented as groups in different series. It is clear to see that her consistent ideas roam freely from one support to another: the flowing drop on the paintings, drawings transformed into bronze sculptures, the cross-hatched lines of the “Ovoides” drawings series being transformed into wall and spatial metal sculptures, and so on.

What does it mean for Brazilian art that Maiolino is the winner of the Lifetime Achievement Golden Lion at the 2024 Venice Biennale?

No doubt it is an extremely important recognition, especially because it is a major homage for a living woman artist. Our generation has witnessed the post-mortem international recognition of several artists related to the Neoconcrete movement. Maybe the only living Brazilian artist with global reach is Cildo Meireles. In my view, the tribute to Maiolino at this specific moment means more than the recognition of a consistent oeuvre full of relevance and strength, it also signals an open path for Brazilian art, historically ignored until now, and its incorporation in the international visual art culture.

Anna Maria Maiolino: Querer e não querer, desejar e temer ”(To want and not to want, to desire and to fear)
Through March 16, 2024
Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo