MASP

Anna Maria Maiolino

The Hero, 1966/2000

  • Author:
    Anna Maria Maiolino
  • Bio:
    Scalea, Itália, 1942
  • Title:
    The Hero
  • Date:
    1966/2000
  • Medium:
    Acrílica sobre madeira, metal e tecido
  • Dimensions:
    59 x 46 x 7 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação da artista, 2015
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.01628
  • Photography credits:
    MASP

TEXTS



Anna Maria Maiolino migrated to Brazil in 1960, after starting her artistic education in Venezuela. Resident of Rio de Janeiro, she participated of the New Figuration movement, a group of artists that preferred to create objects or propose collective artistic experiences, rather than traditional art forms, such as easel painting. Such shifts in language came along with a political engagement from the part of the artists, to the extent that the collective character of their works incorporated themes of public interest, such as the strong social conflicts the country was going through during the 1960s. O Herói can be interpreted as a denunciation of the perversity and authoritarianism of the Brazilian State under military control between 1964 and 1985. The skull alludes to death, allegory of the military violence of that period. Although commonsense understands that 1968 inaugurates the most severe period of the dictatorship due to the decree of the Institutional Act n. 5 that systematized political persecution, it is also known that since 1964 methods of control, intimidation, and extermination were employed, such as torture and the abduction of activists. Therefore, this work of Maiolino anticipated a criticism to the severe violations of human rights by the civil military dictatorship. The term “hero” then bears an ironic aspect and questions the character of this figure, so proud of its medals and at the service of power. This is a second version of it, showing only the original medals, since the first one was destroyed.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017

Source: Adriano Pedrosa (org.), Pocket MASP, São Paulo: MASP, 2020.




By Bryan Barcena
During the late 1960s the images and subject matter that appeared in Maiolino’s woodcut prints were echoed in painted sculptural reliefs. The translation from the rough outlines and simplified palette of the prints to the color and texture of the reliefs suggests a dialogue with the aesthetic of the New Objectivity artists, one of whom was her then-husband Rubens Gerchman. Despite the formal similarities between American-style Pop and Maiolino’s sculptural work of this period, for her and the other Brazilian New Objectivity artists, what was of import was finding a populist aesthetic that could communicate directly and succinctly. For Maiolino, as well as other Brazilian practitioners, the style was deployed not as a cynical reversal of vernacular imagery, as it was in England and the United States, but rather as a way to create a visual language that was direct and readily legible, in essence a truly populist aesthetic. This was part of a broader project that sought to create new forms of art that could would break with the perceived hermetic or elitist qualities of the Brazilian Modernist or Concretyist project and chart a path towards a new art that could harness the language of the tactile, the popular, and the immediate to foment renewed social consciousness. In fact, Maiolino’s early work brings together a series of conceptual and formal concerns that would structure the artist’s career, specifically the relationship between bodily consumption and identity, as well as the use of multiple registers to suggest narrative or organizational associations. By the end of the 1960s Maiolino would abandon the pop-inspired reliefs in favor of more properly defined conceptual works on, and of, paper. However, O Herói is without a doubt one of the most striking and important works ofMaiolino’s early career. The first 10 years of Maiolino’s career were guided by twin concerns of equal urgency: the search for an identity and formulation of a critical response to the Brazilian military dictatorship. From her early woodblock prints to her pioneering videos, Maiolino’s works have been acutely attuned to the terse political atmosphere following the 1964 military coup and ensuing oppression. The instantly recognizable flattened figure of the uniformed General, incorporating actual pins, buttons, and badges, is put into context by the stylized skull and title written below the framed bust. The overt and pointed critique of the Military dictatorship Maiolino is laid bare in this work. One could draw a line tracing Maiolino’s response to the Military dictatorship, from this early work to her later installations Arroz e Feijao and Monumento a Fome, to her 1976 exhibition the Petit Galerie in Rio, wherein she repeatedly played a game of Solitaire or Patience with an incomplete deck of cards, and to her work in film in photography where she appears with eyes bound and mouth gagged. Created at the onset of a dictatorship that would last for over two decades, O Herói marks the beginning of Maiolino’s engagement with anti-authoritarian movements in Brazil.

— Bryan Barcena, 2017

Source: Adriano Pedrosa (org.), MASP Bulletin n. 17, São Paulo: MASP, 2017.



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