Anna Maria Maiolino, born in Italy in 1942, is a Brazilian artist who has lived in Brazil since the 1960s, after having lived and studied in Venezuela.

Her work is part of the reaction to the abstraction and concretism that dominated Brazilian art in the 1950s, taking the subjectivised body, represented (drawn, painted, photographed) or performative (photographed, filmed in action), and the materiality of natural supports, worked mechanically or manually, as the axis of creation.

This aesthetic and generational choice coincided with the need to take a clear stance on the political context of the military dictatorship that had been in place in Brazil since 1964.

The exhibition, in MAAT's Oval Gallery, presents a selection of drawings and photos from the 1970s and 1980s, which shed light on the early stages of her work, while also establishing a productive relationship with the clay sculptures she began working on in the 1980s, which will be the focus of this exhibition.

Especially for the occasion, Anna Maria Maiolino will create a dozen of these clay sculptures modelled on site, the largest she has ever produced, with which she will populate the vast space of the room, defining the paths of the public and leading them to establish a strong sensory and poetic relationship with the materiality (in permanent transformation) of the pieces.