ART TALK

RE-DIGESTING
HER OWN WORK

Anna Maria Maiolinos Untitled, 2011, from a recent series featuring molded cement and pigment.

Everyone is an artist, says Anna Maria Maiolino. Its just that some people accept it, and
others dont. Speaking to ARTNews at her So Paulo
home and studio in advance of her solo show at Galeria
Luisa Strina, Maiolino, now 72, says she accepted the
challenge of becoming a working artist at the age of 16,
shortly after her family had moved from Italy to Venezuela and then to Brazil, where she was quickly caught
up in the effervescent artistic and intellectual climate of
1960s Rio de Janeiro. Maiolino took part in many of Brazilian arts seminal 1960s exhibitions and movements.
Starting out as a printmaker, Maiolino has gone on
to incorporate a vast range of mediums and techniques,
including film, photography, drawing, poetry, sound,
and sculpture, and even hand-blown glass in the series
Emanados (2007). In 1994, for an earlier series Terra
Modelada, she began working with unfired clay, using
the material to produce some of her most unforgettable

works. At the 2012 Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany,

she filled the surfaces of a house with fragments of handshaped clay formed in a near-ritual of manual repetition.
Glowing with a sensual, almost-living sheen, the installation, Aqui e L (2012), drew on themes she had been
working on since the 1960s as part of a body of work
predicated on the corporal and steeped in a carnality that
is anything but sexual.
The woodcut Glu Glu Glu (1966), for example, depicts
a ravenous figure, its mouth open wide before a table
of food, and in the lower half of the print, a toilet. In a
painted version from 1967, a colorful matrix of intestines provides the punchline.
As an artist, you modify things, she says. Objects,
materials. But art is working on you at the same time
you are transformed in the artistic process. As an individual, I have been seeking that transformation my
CLAIRE RIGBY
whole life.

EDOUARD FRAIPONT/ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND GALERIA LUISA STRINA, SO PAULO

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NOVEMBER 2014

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9/29/14 3:37 PM