Anna María Maiolino
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela
To talk about Anna María Maiolino (Scalea, Italy, 1942) is to talk about one of the essential voices and languages in Brazilian contemporary art, a necessary element to understand the evolution of artistic experimentation of the productive 1960s and fundamental to understand its later development. After its presentation in Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona, it was the turn of the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela to host this concise retrospective of the Brazilian artist’s work. Her history is well known. She arrived from Second World War Italy in promising Brazil, which at that time was awaiting the emergence of Oscar Niemeyer, with no knowledge of the language and with a vivid feeling of otherness. It is this feeling that, even to this day, leads Anna María Maiolino to always refer to the geographic environment, to the time and circumstances associated to the creation of each artwork.
The retrospective traces through a fine thread the artistic trajectory of an artist devoted to the avant-garde and constantly questioning, partly as a result of her experience with identity, an identity that will gradually transform and that will become reflected in her work. That temporal and personal disorder derived from her status of émigré, will serve to inspire an organic art, an art in constant transformation, typical of Brazilian artistic tradition, and which is born as a live being in its gestation and in its assimilation of all that surrounds it, translating its environment into new forms.
On the occasion of the show curated by Helena Tatay, the artist made an ephemeral installation in which around six tons of clay had been turned into churros1 and muffins, a product of the routine character reflected by such repetitive movements as kneading bread, and which would become gradually detached and would turn into dust until they disappeared completely. The tour of the rest of the exhibition allowed the viewer to contemplate her whole trajectory in a very detailed way, and to discover that constant transformation in the works produced in the multiple formats used by Maiolino, such as drawing, photography, poetry, installations or action art. Testimonies of this were the cartographies of Mapas Mentais or the xylographies of the 1960s (Glu Glu), as well as the more or less encrypted meanings of her Fotopoemações, or of other video pieces such as In-Out (Antropofagia) of 1973. The essential piece Entrevidas, which evokes the 1981 performance, was recreated in one of the rooms where eggs had been scattered, thus revisiting one of Maiolino’s most representative works, symbolizing in turn one of the most creative periods of contemporary art.
1A typical Spanish food, consisting of a long thin cylinder of dough, deep-fried in olive oil and often dusted with sugar.
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One more time, 2011. Unfired clay, dimensions variable.
Una vez más, 2011. Barro sin cocer. Dimensiones variables.
