PARIS.- From June 14 to September 21, 2025, the Musée National Picasso-Paris welcomes Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino for her very first solo exhibition in France, “Anna Maria Maiolino. Je suis là. Estou Aqui”. Part of Brazil's cultural season in France, and curated by Emilio Khalil, this retrospective is one of the highlights of Brazil in Paris. Recently awarded a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale 2024, Anna Maria Maiolino will be exhibiting some one hundred works, including previously unpublished drawings, sculptures, paintings and films.

Through a multi-faceted approach encompassing films, installations, drawings, sculptures in cement, plaster or metal, photographs, mind maps and paintings, his work reveals an intimate and engaged reflection on exile, language and memory.

For his first institutional presentation in France, the artist has chosen to entitle this exhibition Je suis là. Estou Aqui, evoking his own exile. “To leave, to escape, is to draw a line. To cross the horizon, to enter another life. (Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “De la supériorité de la littérature anglaise-américaine”, Dialogues, Paris, Flammarion, 1996.)

From an early age, Anna Maria Maiolino rejected the principles of abstraction to take an active part in the new “Brazilian figuration”, a movement protesting government policies. She collaborated with major figures such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica, and inscribed her work in a critique of Brazil's social and political conditions. She tackled censorship in her experimental films Antropofagia (1973), which soon won her numerous awards.

His body becomes an instrument of resistance through his performances, while his famous “mental maps” structure space in grids organizing words, names and places.

Maiolino enters drawing like one enters a foreign language, in other words, like an explorer. For her, drawing provokes a kind of deceleration of thought. Drawing both slows down and intensifies the thought process, as meaning is built up step by step.

She also combines drawing and sculpture, creating three-dimensional paper sculptures and new landscapes. She explored new materials such as clay in the late 1980s. She creates vast installations in which the traces of her actions are preserved by the material.

Like Pablo Picasso, who lived in exile, Anna Maria Maiolino is a Brazilian artist of Italian origin. To resist censorship, she implemented a strategy of détournement, notably using experimental film in the 1970s. Her performances and writings also reflect her commitment to respect and freedom for all.

With the exhibition “Anna Maria Maiolino. Je suis là. Estou Aqui”, the Musée National Picasso-Paris invites the public to take an unprecedented plunge into the world of a major contemporary artist, whose work combines commitment, experimentation and the ‘intelligence of the material.