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Lot Essay
Two distinct and amorphous forms puncture a brilliant, orange ground in Anna Maria Maiolino’s Untitled (from Ações Matéricas). Executed in 1998, it comes from a series of paintings titled ‘Ações Matéricas’ (Matter Actions), in which the artist poured black and white paint directly onto vibrantly coloured canvases. Set at slight angles, and so inviting an interplay of gravity and chance, these works bear witness to the performative and automatic processes that drive the artist’s creative practice. Over a six-decade-long career, Maiolino has created an extraordinary body of cross-disciplinary work that spans painting, sculpture, printmaking, film, performance and drawing. Her art reflects a vivid and itinerant upbringing between post-war Italy and South America, and grapples with interwoven themes of selfhood, place, and language. Her first retrospective in the UK was the recent, critically acclaimed Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary at Whitechapel Gallery (2019-2020), and this year, she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, cementing her position as one of the most significant contemporary artists working in South America today. Acquired directly from the artist, the present work has remained in the same private collection for over two decades since it was made.
Born in the southern Italian town of Scalea in 1942, Maiolino migrated with her parents to Venezuela at the age of twelve before relocating to Brazil in 1960, where she has lived and worked ever since. She attended the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas in Carcas and the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, and gained recognition in the sixties and seventies for her connection to the important Brazilian artistic movements of New Figuration and New Objectivity. In 1967, she took part in the seminal exhibition of ‘New Brazilian Objectivity’ at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art—alongside artists Hélio Oiticica, Rubens Gerschman, Raymundo Colares, and Antonio Dias—which proposed a new, participatory approach to art amidst Brazil’s complex sociopolitical landscape. Since the 1980s, the artist has explored with newfound interest the physical conditions of her materials, adopting gestural and corporal mark-making techniques to produce diverse and surprising visual effects. Here, bearing its own intricate and free-flowing forms, the present work is a beacon of Maiolino’s vital investigations.
Born in the southern Italian town of Scalea in 1942, Maiolino migrated with her parents to Venezuela at the age of twelve before relocating to Brazil in 1960, where she has lived and worked ever since. She attended the Escuela de Artes Plásticas Cristóbal Rojas in Carcas and the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro, and gained recognition in the sixties and seventies for her connection to the important Brazilian artistic movements of New Figuration and New Objectivity. In 1967, she took part in the seminal exhibition of ‘New Brazilian Objectivity’ at Rio de Janeiro’s Museum of Modern Art—alongside artists Hélio Oiticica, Rubens Gerschman, Raymundo Colares, and Antonio Dias—which proposed a new, participatory approach to art amidst Brazil’s complex sociopolitical landscape. Since the 1980s, the artist has explored with newfound interest the physical conditions of her materials, adopting gestural and corporal mark-making techniques to produce diverse and surprising visual effects. Here, bearing its own intricate and free-flowing forms, the present work is a beacon of Maiolino’s vital investigations.