Black Spiral

An heir to the Neo-Concrete movement in Brazil, Anna Maria Maiolino explored the page itself, using its surface as an object or body rather than a support. She applied tactics like tearing, cutting, sewing, or folding the page to open up new spaces and reveal layers of depth beneath the surface. In these hybrid works, which she called “drawing-objects,” Maiolino developed an austere visual language that blurs the boundaries between words, lines, cuts, and emptiness. “What I seek is to poetize the fullness of the void,” Maiolino explained. “The sheets of paper, as the layers of an onion, are slices of space that indicate the existence of other invisible planes, on the inside, towards the indefinite.”