Arts and Design

Anna Maria Maiolino review – roll up for a witty surrealist sausage party


There are phallic images all over the place in Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino’s witty and weird show, but this is no triumph for the male member. Like a once cocksure prime minister, the sausages and worms of freshly shaped clay that open the show seem crestfallen. Long reddish-brown tubes are stacked up like dead fish. A clay salami has been chopped into slices. Look out for this artist and her knife.

Maiolino is a surrealist who finds the inner secrets of physical existence, while seducing the senses with frolicking lines and supple surfaces. Her subjugated willies are just the half of it. While snakes and chipolatas flop about uselessly, very vaginal-looking orifices lead the mind into hidden places. A series of sculptures made last year resemble cross-sections of a landscape that has been pockmarked and excavated by tiny tunnellers. Caverns open in the earth and lead to underground cities you can’t help trying to see into. These messy subterranean networks are halfway between a termite colony and a lost South American civilisation.

Untitled, from the series the Great Absent, 2014.



Untitled, from the series the Great Absent, 2014. Photograph: Everton Ballardin/Courtesy of the artist

Black Hole, a hypnotic, wall-mounted masterpiece made in 1974, has five sheets of thick black paper held in a square frame with small spaces between them. All except the last have circles of diminishing sizes cut out of them so you look into a stepped pit, like the descending circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno. The combination of precise calm and apocalyptic darkness is tense and compelling. This black hole sucks you in.

Another void opens in a bigger black picture that Maiolino first made in 1973. This time, the lightless surface of a large painted wood panel has the shape of the South American continent cut out of it. Beyond is another layer of darkness. It is called Geographic Situation: Black Soul of Latin America. But Maiolino’s organic play is not just whimsy. Born in Italy in 1942, she has lived in Brazil since she was 18 – the country where she settled succumbed to military dictatorship in 1964 and did not get a democracy again until the 1980s. Today, its far-right elected president Jair Bolsonaro is openly nostalgic for authoritarian rule – so there’s an urgency to this retrospective of an artist who bravely protested against dictatorship in the 1970s.

Art by Maiolino at the Whitechapel gallery



Forgotten pictogram script? … more work by Maiolino at the Whitechapel gallery. Photograph: Matt Alexander/PA

Maiolino wasn’t afraid to satirise military rule directly in woodcuts that echo the early 20th-century graphic art of Mexico’s José Guadalupe Posada. Her Posada-like 1966 print The Hero depicts a black-uniformed general whose face is an empty-eyed skull. This is art made not against a loudmouthed, 21st-century populist but an actual authoritarian regime that tortured and murdered dissidents.

Yet Maiolino is much more than a cartoonist. Her art undermines authoritarian rule in a similar way to Guillermo del Toro’s horror film about the Franco era, Pan’s Labyrinth – by revealing an underground world of dreams and monsters undreamt of in fascist philosophy. Her art is one great splurge of freedom. Drip paintings evoke the fluid art of Jackson Pollock – but Maiolino’s drips go in contradictory directions, forcing you to try to work out how she constructed these networks of flowing colour.

Her drawings, too, create intricate yet always-moving interconnections and flows. In fact, her art creates its own secret reality with a structure that pulls you in, only to resist interpretation. She even shows a series of calligraphic drawings that resemble a lost alphabet. It could be the language of her hidden cities, the forgotten pictogram script of the mysterious civilisation that excavated her tunnels where hope is born in primal darkness.

At Whitechapel Gallery, London, until 12 January.



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