LISBON.- In the year the museum celebrates its 10th anniversary, March welcomes one of the most sensitive and engaging proposals in Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology's programme for 2026. The exhibition Anna Maria Maiolino – Poetic Earth will be open to the public from 25/03/2026 at MAAT Gallery. Alongside drawings and photographs, the exhibition features several clay sculptures, including a new set weighing around eight tonnes, modelled in situ during the installation. These are the largest sculptures Maiolino has ever created and give an insight into the artist's unique journey and her commitment to matter and gesture, enhancing the physical and poetic dimension of the visitor's experience.

Anna Maria Maiolino, born in Italy in 1942, is a Brazilian artist who has lived in Brazil since the 1960s, after having lived and studied in Venezuela. Her work is part of the reaction to the abstraction and concretism that dominated Brazilian art in the 1950s, taking the subjectivised body, represented (drawn, painted, photographed) or performative (photographed, filmed in action), and the materiality of natural supports, worked mechanically or manually, as the axis of creation. This aesthetic and generational choice coincided with the need to take a clear stance on the political context of the military dictatorship that had been in place in Brazil since 1964.

The exhibition, in MAAT's Oval Gallery, presents a selection of drawings and photos from the 1970s and 1980s, which shed light on the early stages of her work, while also establishing a productive relationship with the clay sculptures she began working on in the 1980s, which will be the focus of this exhibition. Especially for the occasion, Anna Maria Maiolino will create a dozen of these clay sculptures modelled on site, the largest she has ever produced, with which she will populate the vast space of the room, defining the paths of the public and leading them to establish a strong sensory and poetic relationship with the materiality (in permanent transformation) of the pieces.

For more than six decades, Anna Maria Maiolino's (Scalea, Italy, 1942) practice has incorporated diverse media – drawing, sculpture, printmaking, video, installation, performance, and poetry – in a constant search for new forms of expression. The body, language, desire, and subjectivity are treated as territories of experimentation, where the personal merges with the political and the intimate opens up to the collective. The experience of migration – from southern Italy to Venezuela – plays a central role in her artistic investigation, shaping a thought process attentive to issues of identity, belonging, and memory.

From the 1980s onwards, Maiolino began to explore the relationship between gesture and matter intensively, using materials such as clay, plaster, and modelling compounds. In her hands, these materials record repetitive and intuitive actions that evoke primordial processes linked to the body, such as eating or breathing. From these gestures emerge not only shapes, but rhythms, flaws, and pauses that make time, fragility, and the pulse of life visible. Her work proposes a particular approach to abstraction, marked by an organicity that breaks with rigid formal conventions and opens up to the tactile, affective, and existential experience of the world. In 2024, Maiolino received the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her body of work.