Anna Maria Maiolino: Poetic Earth

MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology presents Poetic Earth, a major exhibition by Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, 1942), one of the most acclaimed and influential figures in contemporary Latin American art, awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in the 60th International Venice Biennale in 2024. 

Bringing together works produced between 1975 and 2025, the exhibition foregrounds the sculptural dimension of Maiolino's practice, with a particular emphasis on her sustained engagement with clay and other malleable materials. 

The experience of migration has marked her career: born in Italy, she spent her childhood in Venezuela, then lived in Argentina and the United States of America before finally settling in Brazil in 1960, where she developed most of her work. Since the 1980s, Maiolino has been developing a vast body of work in clay and other mouldable materials, and exploring processes of transformation, repetition and resistance, in which manual work takes on a simultaneously intimate, feminist and political dimension.

The exhibition at MAAT Gallery is organised as a journey, conceived around the characteristics of the 1,200sqm Oval Gallery space. Along the walls of the gallery's ramp, there are photographs, small sculptures, and an extensive series of over 100 drawings created between 1990 and 2025, entitled “Tempestade de Ideias” [storm of ideas], a collection of doodles, graphic exercises, variations of shapes sketched on paper, and notes on potential future sculptures.

In the lower arena, a substantial and multifaceted group of sculptural works of varying scales is presented—some of the largest Maiolino has ever produced. Among them are several installations in raw clay, shaped in situ by the artist, her team, and local ceramicists, using 8 tonnes of material. “The sculptures reveal a deep attention to tactile qualities, weight, fragility, and the transformation of an impermanent material: as it dries in the exhibition space, the clay changes colour, hardens and approaches the condition of stone,” say the curators.

These works maintain continuity with her series “Terra Modelada” [modelled earth], begun in 1993, in which repeated gestures (rolling, dividing, accumulating), evoking family moments of preparing pasta, and direct contact with the material, reveal the time inscribed in manual labour, as well as the natural cycle of the earth itself, in constant transformation.

“It was at the beginning of my work with moulded sculptures that my first encounter with clay occurred—a moment when a true cosmovision revealed itself. Through its plasticity, elasticity, and sensuality to the touch, associated with the idea of primal matter and the beginning of everything, clay became a privileged interpreter of multiple works in my practice, such as the moulded sculptures series and, especially, the large installations,” says Anna Maria Maiolino.

MAAT will publish a catalogue featuring essays by Tania Rivera (psychoanalyst, writer and curator) and Michael Asbury (art historian, critic and curator), along with installation views of the exhibition.