Anna Maria Maiolino: A Life Line/Vida Afora

In the first U.S. museum exhibition of drawings by Anna Maria Maiolino (born 1942), curator Catherine de Zegher, Executive Director of The Drawing Center, included over 100 drawings from the 1960s to the time of the exhibition, many of which were on loan from private and public collections in Brazil. The drawings came from the collections of the Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; Museu de Belas Artes, Rio de Janeiro; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and several private collections both in Brazil and the United States, as well as from the collection of the artist.

Maiolino is one of the most important artists of her generation in Brazil, where she has made great contributions to contemporary art and to the field of drawing. Born in Calabria, Italy, in 1942, she emigrated to Caracas, Venezuela, in 1954 and then in 1960 moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she finished her art studies. Together with drawing, which has always been crucial to her work, Maiolino's practice also comprises film, performance, installation, photography, and sculpture—media through which she has often expressed a form of resistance to the reigning Brazilian military regime.

Her '70s drawings involved the rupture of the surface of handmade paper, and, along with traditional graphic materials, she used new elements, such as folds, cuts, and thread-sewn seams. These were used in a larger exploration of the "in-between" space in works that linked the dualities black and white, inside and outside, positive and negative, art and life. Maiolino's sculptures from the 1980s used methods from ceramists in the making of utensils, such as serpentines and rolls, along with dividing, kneading, cutting. These works emphasized not only the material's corporeality and potential for transformation and rearrangement, but also the body of the artist at work. Speaking of this work, Maiolino has said, "This deals with an open work, labor that does not end, the storing of entropy-energy spent in pleasurable fatigue-which overflows with affection and unconscious drives, and in which nature dwells; that of the element modeled and mine."