As an immigrant coming of age in a politically unstable Brazil, Anna Maria Maiolino searched for a new language to articulate everyday human existence. One of the most important artists of her generation, Maiolino’s multidisciplinary practice has always sought to connect art and life, to give structure to primordial experiences of language, self, and the body. The performance-installation Entrevidas (Between Lives), was originally conceived in 1981, during the period between the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship and its return to democracy. Spectators were invited to cross an obstacle course of hundreds of eggs on a cobbled street of Rio de Janeiro to experience feelings of uncertainty and risk, but also to imagine the resiliency of life and of new beginnings. Revisiting the installation today, the artist points to the precariousness and potential of the present moment.

Anna Maria Maiolino was born in Italy in 1942 and migrated to Brazil in 1960. She participated in the Nova Figuração (New Figuration) movement there in the early 1960s. Shifting away from representation toward Conceptualism in the early 1970s, Maiolino began working with Super 8, photography, and installation art that prominently featured clay. Major exhibitions of her work have been held in 2001 at The Drawing Center and Art in General, New York; in 2005 at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo; in 2006 at Miami Art Central; in 2010 at the Camden Arts Centre, London, and the Antoní Tàpies Foundation, Barcelona; and in 2017 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Her work is included in the permanent collections of major museums, including the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.