Raffaella Cortese is pleased to announce Anna Maria Maiolino’s first solo show in Italy.

Works by the artist will be contemporaneously on show at Camden Arts Centre, London, and will then move to Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Italian by birth later adopted Brazilian, a key-representative of South American contemporary art, although not yet well known in Europe, Maiolino’s ouvre encompasses different languages and means of expression, from performance to sculpture, from video to photography.

Drawing inspiration from the everyday feminine imagery of an oppressive and censoring dictatorship, Maiolino creates simple – yet full of heat – objects and actions. Thanks to repetition, her works take on a primeval meaning, heading to both the very origin of things and her own militancy in 1970s and 1980s in Brazil.

Core part of the show is her video and photography production from the 1970s and 1980s, a period of harsh conflicts due to censorship and the rise of international counter-culture movements, such as women’s movement and the sexual revolution.

Fotopoemação series, begun in 1973 and carried on up to present, has been experienced and thus offered to audience as an image-based reworking of Maiolino’s own poems or a still version related to her performances and videos.

Leading role in Vida Afora series is performed by oval-shaped forms, made everyday objects by representing the egg, which calls for perfection and the inexhaustible living and breeding force of women and art.

Trapped mouths, nose and tongue-cutting scissors, faces wrapped up in ribbons are some of the images of In e Out Antropofagia and É o que Sobra, works whose strong yet simple gestures perfectly render the difficulty of self-expression, and portray Maiolino’s art.