A line can be a mark on paper, a boundary, a record of movement—or a way of imagining infinity. In the work of Anna Maria Maiolino, the line becomes all these things at once: a trace of the body, a fragment of memory and a gesture repeated until it opens onto something larger than itself.
At Hauser & Wirth’s New York gallery on West 18th Street, ANNA—And the Infinite Line brings together work spanning approximately six decades of Maiolino’s practice. Moving between early prints and drawings, photography, and sculpture, the exhibition offers a concentrated view of an artist who has consistently challenged the boundaries between personal experience and broader social realities. The presentation also coincides with the release of a documentary of the same title from The Forgotten Her Story. <Cite refs={[“turn437857search0″,”turn437857search2”]}/>
On view from September 10 through October 31, 2026, the exhibition arrives as an opportunity to encounter Maiolino’s work not as a fixed style but as an evolving investigation into what it means to exist, communicate and make things with one’s hands.
A Life Shaped by Movement
Born in Scalea, Italy, in 1942, Maiolino migrated through Venezuela before establishing herself in Brazil. Her experience of moving between countries and languages became an enduring part of her artistic outlook. Questions of identity, belonging and self-representation appear throughout her work, often expressed through the most basic visual elements: a name, a line, a repeated form or an everyday object. <Cite refs={[“turn437857search2”]}/>
Her career developed alongside major shifts in Brazilian art and politics. In the 1960s, her work intersected with New Figuration and New Objectivity, movements that helped reshape the relationship between art, public life and the art object itself. She participated in the landmark 1967 exhibition New Brazilian Objectivity, alongside artists including Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. <Cite refs={[“turn437857search2”]}/>
The Chelsea exhibition places this history in a wider frame. Rather than presenting migration, political change and private life as separate subjects, it suggests how they become intertwined in the artist’s choice of materials and gestures.
The Name as Self-Portrait
One of the exhibition’s central early works is the woodcut Anna (1967). Instead of depicting the artist’s face, the work uses the letters of her name to consider the relationship between language and identity. The choice is deceptively simple. A name identifies a person, but it is also a system of signs—something spoken, written, translated and interpreted by others.
That tension runs through Maiolino’s practice. Representation is never entirely neutral: the self is both something experienced from within and something made legible to the outside world.
The exhibition also includes drawings from Entre Pausas (Between Pauses), a diaristic series associated with Maiolino’s period in New York after leaving Rio de Janeiro in 1968. She described these drawings as “records of existence,” linking the act of making marks to the process of adapting to unfamiliar surroundings. <Cite refs={[“turn437857search0”]}/>
In this context, drawing becomes more than preparation for a finished artwork. It is a way of registering time—an ongoing record of thought, uncertainty and adjustment.
Photography Under Political Pressure
After returning to Brazil in 1971, Maiolino lived under military dictatorship. The political climate shaped her experiments with photography, particularly the series Fotopoemação (Photo-poem-action). These works combine photographic images with conceptual and poetic gestures, drawing attention to the ways ordinary life can acquire political meaning when speech and public expression are constrained. <Cite refs={[“turn437857search0”]}/>
The photographs do not need to operate as straightforward documentary evidence to carry political weight. Their force comes from the collision of the mundane, the absurd and the disturbing. Everyday actions and objects become charged with questions about power, vulnerability and the limits imposed on expression.
Later works associated with Vida Afora (A Life Line) respond to Brazil’s gradual return to democracy with a more cautiously hopeful register. The egg recurs as a motif, holding together ideas of fragility, potential and resilience. It is an ordinary object that can suggest both the vulnerability of life and the possibility of new beginnings. <Cite refs={[“turn437857search0”]}/>
Maiolino’s political imagination is therefore not limited to explicit slogans or images of protest. It also emerges through the way she looks at daily existence—and how even the smallest gesture can be shaped by a larger historical reality.
Clay, Repetition and the Intelligence of the Hand
A significant transformation in Maiolino’s practice began in 1989, when she started working with clay. The material introduced a different physical rhythm: rolling, coiling, pressing and repeating. These actions became central to a sculptural language grounded in labor and bodily knowledge. <Cite refs={[“turn437857search0″,”turn437857search2”]}/>
Works such as São 8 (There Are 8, 1993) and Cobrinhas (Little Snakes, 2018) are built through the repetition of simple forms. Their arrangements can recall everyday routines, including the preparation of food, while also suggesting ritual, accumulation and transformation.
Repetition here is not merely a formal device. Each repeated movement records the presence of the maker. The resulting forms connect abstract sculpture to physical experience, making the body’s labor visible rather than concealing it behind a polished final object.
Maiolino’s Híbridos (Hybrid) series extends this investigation by incorporating the mold used in casting into the finished sculpture. The process and its residue become part of the work, unsettling the conventional distinction between an artwork and the means by which it is produced. <Cite refs={[“turn437857search0”]}/>
The title And the Infinite Line offers a useful way to understand this practice. A repeated gesture may seem finite, but it can also imply continuation: one action leading into another, one form echoing the next. Through seriality, small physical acts open onto larger questions about existence and time.
Returning to Drawing, Entering the Dark
The exhibition also brings attention back to drawing through Na Noite – No Escuro (At Night – In the Dark), a series made with white permanent marker on black paper. The contrast reverses the familiar relationship between dark ground and dark mark, turning the act of drawing into a search for visibility within darkness. Works from the series include examples dated 2026. <Cite refs={[“turn437857search0”]}/>
This return to drawing is not a retreat from sculpture. Instead, it reveals a continuity across the artist’s different media. Whether working with paper, photographs or clay, Maiolino remains interested in the physical act of making and the ways a gesture can communicate before it becomes a clearly defined image or statement.
Her practice invites viewers to consider not only what an artwork represents but also how it came into being: the movement of a hand, the repetition of a task, the pressure of a material and the passage of time.
The Infinite in the Everyday
ANNA—And the Infinite Line makes a compelling case for understanding Maiolino’s career through its continuities rather than its stylistic shifts. Her early experiments with names and drawings, her politically attentive photography, and her later sculptural repetitions all return to a shared concern with the fragile, unfinished nature of human experience.
The exhibition’s scope is especially valuable because it allows viewers to see how these concerns persist across decades without becoming static. Identity changes with language and place; political circumstances alter the meaning of ordinary life; materials invite different forms of physical knowledge. Yet the impulse to make, repeat and leave a trace remains.
At Hauser & Wirth, the line becomes more than a mark. It is a record of movement through history and an invitation to keep looking. In Maiolino’s hands, the infinite does not require monumental scale. It can begin with a name, a coil of clay, a photograph or the simple act of drawing one line after another.
