Anna Maria Maiolino

During an interview with the critic and researcher Paulo Herkenhoff, Anna Maria Maiolino said: “I am not a clean artist, I am a contaminated artist.” The permeability she refers to runs through her work as a printmaker, painter, sculptor and multimedia artist.

When she arrived in Rio de Janeiro in 1960, Anna Maria began studying printmaking at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. She was already making multiple objects at that time, but she worked mainly on large-scale woodcuts. Her work dealt with urban themes, many of them tied to everyday life and to the condition of women in society.

Anna Maria lived in the United States from 1968 to 1971. While there she focused on drawing, inspired by the experimental poetry of the 1960s. Back in Brazil, she began to explore alternative media and materials, working with film and making installations, for example. In another stylistic shift, from the 1980s onward she turned to painting and to clay sculpture, testing the limits of that material. Her body of work is extensive and varied, the result of the path of a restless creator attentive to her time.