Artist: Anna Maria Maiolino

A presentation of 14 selected artworks across painting and sculpture by internationally acclaimed artist Anna Maria Maiolino opens this July at Hauser & Wirth St. Moritz. Born 1942 in Italy and one of the most significant artists working in Brazil today, Anna Maria Maiolino works across a wide range of disciplines and mediums, including drawing, printmaking, poetry, film, performance, installation and sculpture. Within her practice, Maiolino relentlessly explores notions of subjectivity and self. Through fragmentation and abstraction, her surfaces are rich with metaphor, alluding to and questioning language, sexuality, desire and the unconscious.

Maiolino was recently honored with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2024, titled ‘Foreigners Everywhere – Stranieri Ovunque’ – a testament to her extraordinary contribution to the art world. Maiolino is participating in La Biennale di Venezia for the first time this year, presenting a new large-scale work that continues and unfolds her series of sculptures and installations in clay, on view through 24 November 2024.

The artworks on view in St. Moritz include three of Maiolino’s metal sculptures from her 2016 series Hilomorfos (Hylomporhs), named after hylomorphism, the Greek philosophical doctrine that physical beings result from the combination of matter and form. Showcasing the artist’s skillful ability to manipulate matter, iron rods support hand molded, organic shapes cast in bronze that emanate a human presence. In her series Ações Matéricas (Material Actions), from which two paintings are shown in the presentation, Maiolino’s mark-making is based on a meditative approach in which she allows gravity to determine the composition. Covering the canvas in a single color, the artist then pours black acrylic ink onto the surface, intuitively maneuvering the canvas to guide the pigment across the space to produce amorphous shapes that draw parallels with the forms of her sculptures. Maiolino further explores the possibilities of black acrylic ink in a work on paper from her Despacho (Dispatch) series (2014).

Other works on display deal with the dichotomy between full and empty spaces, as explored through the title of the series A Sombra do Outro (Shadow of the Other) (2014) as well as the process of making the works. To produce the cubes of cement replete with voids, the artist uses clay molds with forms that appear as hollow spaces once carefully removed from the dried cement. Voids, as demonstrated in a molded cement work from the Novos Ausentes (New Absent) series (2011), are a recurring motif in the artist’s work, evoking a sense of loss and dislocation. Maiolino also pursues this motif with the steel series Escarificações (Scarifications) (2018), using a laser cut to investigate the contrast between positive and negative, present and absent, inside and outside. Above all, Maiolino’s is a work of liberation: abstraction is freed from the more repressed and puritanical precepts of Minimalism and brought back into the service of the active, desiring body.