Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary review – Inspired show by an artist who challenged Brazil's dictators

Standout show: The exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery is one of the best of 2019
Ben Luke15 October 2019

Anna Maria Maiolino has been making work across six decades and, now 77, is producing some of her best pieces.

Making Love Revolutionary, immaculately curated by Lydia Yee, Trinidad Fombella and Ines Costa, reverses the chronology of her career, so we’re met first by her latest: folds of intestinal clay piled into a void amid a wall and, on a table, lozenges and discs and curls of clay, all of which will slowly dry and transform through the life of the show. But as we travel backwards, we discover the rich and often courageous trajectory of her life and work.

Maiolino was born in Italy in 1942 and left aged 12, first for Caracas and then, eight years later, Rio de Janeiro, where she’s lived for most of her life. She recalls “feeling like I was in quicksand” when she arrived but she quickly absorbed both the modern and historic artistic culture of Brazil. Before long, she was associated with artists of an earlier generation, such as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, but also married young and says: “Being an artist, woman and mother was part of my baggage from the beginning.”

She also worked under the dictatorship that continued until 1985 yet she managed to produce a remarkably uncompromising body of work in the Seventies, across photography, film, drawing and sculpture, much of it informed by political and domestic oppression.

In What Is Left Over she pictures herself taking scissors to her tongue and nose, and in a series of works involving eggs — walking among them as they’re scattered on cobbles, gripping one in her fist, placing another on her naked thighs — she captures an embodied political activism, bound up with her womanhood.

From the Eighties her likeness disappears from her work but her body and her voice have remained, through the visceral works in clay, plaster and cement and through countless marvellous abstract drawings and works in thread. This is one of the shows of the year.

Until Jan 12 (020 7522 7888, whitechapelgallery.org)

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