Anna Maria Maiolino: Poetic Earth at MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon

Anna Maria Maiolino: Poetic Earth is on view at MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, Lisbon

March 25 – August 31, 2026

Curators: João Pinharanda and Sérgio Mah

MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology presents Poetic Earth, a major exhibition by Anna Maria Maiolino, one of the most acclaimed and influential figures in contemporary Latin American art. 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. Marking the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in Portugal, Poetic Earth follows her participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2024, where she was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

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.

Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, Italy, 1942) is one of the most acclaimed and influential artists in contemporary Latin American art. The experience of migration has marked her career: born in Italy, and after spending her childhood in Venezuela, she lived in Argentina and the United States of America before finally settling in Brazil in 1960, where she developed most of her work.

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, notes on potential future sculptures.

In the lower arena of the Oval Gallery, 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, members of her team, and local ceramicists, using eight 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. 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.

The opening of Poetic Earth will feature a performance by Maiolino, revisiting one of her most emblematic works, originally conceived in 1981 as Entrevidas, a powerful manifesto against torture and in support of democratic openness in Brazil. Since then, it has been performed ten times, most recently at MASP in São Paulo in 2025, when the artist reinterpreted the work and created KA, incorporating the gesture of raised hands as a poetic-political plea for peace and disarmament.

On the occasion of the exhibition opening at MAAT, Maiolino presented KA for the first time outside Brazil. On 30 August, the museum will mark the final phase of the exhibition with Entrevidas 1981/2026, performed by Gabriel Sitchin, actor and the artist’s grandson.

MAAT published 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 in the Oval Gallery.

About the artist
Anna Maria Maiolino, a Brazilian artist, lives and works in São Paulo. She was born in Scalea, Italy, in 1942 to an Italian father and an Ecuadorian mother. She emigrated to Venezuela with her family in 1954, and in 1958, she enrolled in an art course. In 1960, she moved to Brazil with her parents. In Rio de Janeiro, she attended painting and woodcut courses. From the beginning, she was integrated into the cultural milieu and, in 1967, she participated in the exhibition Nova Objetividade Brasileira (MAM Rio – Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro), and signed the “Declaration of Basic Principles of the Vanguard” along with other artists like Hélio Oiticica, Antonio Dias, Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, among others.

Her work was included in Inside the Visible: an elliptical traverse of 20th-century art (The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, travelling exhibition, 1996). Other relevant group exhibitions are On Line: Drawing Through the Twentieth Century (MoMA, New York, 2010), Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985 (Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, travelling exhibition, 2017), Artevida: Política (MAM Rio, 2014) and Artevida: Corpo (Casa França-Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 2014), senzamargine: Passages in Italian Art at the Turn of the Millennium (MAXXI—National Museum of 21st Century Arts, Rome, 2021, curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi), and Danse et rituel (CN D – Centre national de la danse, Paris, 2021). Some of her most important solo shows are Vida Afora / A Life Line (The Drawing Center, New York, 2002), Entre Muitos (Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, 2005), Anna Maria Maiolino (Fundació Antoní Tàpies, Barcelona, travelling exhibition, 2010), Continuum (Camden Arts Centre, London, 2010), Anna Maria Maiolino (MOCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 2017), O Amor se Faz Revolucionário (PAC – Padiglione d’Arte Contemporânea, Milan, 2019), psssiiiuuu… (Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, 2022), Schhhiii… (MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, 2022), I am here. Estou Aqui (Musée National Picasso-Paris, 2025).

In 2010, Maiolino’s work was included in the 29th São Paulo Biennial. In 2012, she was invited to show at dOCUMENTA 13, Kassel, and in 2024, she participated in the La Biennale di Venezia for the first time and was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement. Maiolino’s works are part of several important public and private collections worldwide.

Contact
maat@edp.pt

MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology
Av. Brasília, Belém
1300-598 Lisbon
Portugal