Anna Maria Maiolino

'It is a territory marked by the fragility of life
Guardian-embryos enclose the male/female
The egg coupled
Impregnated
Is on the plate
On the valuable pedestal
In the middle of the space
Lies the threat of death in the false step that crushes
In treading upon this field of seeded lives
In religious silence feet walk under the unfolded canopy
This is a portion of heaven determining the amount of earth
That will be occupied
Thus we relive that which had been forgotten
And step-by-step we recall that which is known'
Poem by Anna Maria Maiolino accompanying her egg sculpture.

At the Antoni Tapies Foundation in Barcelona I went along, lacking sleep, to the first major retrospective of Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. Working with installations, videos, sculpture, photography and just about every modern material available and engaging with the political climate of her country, I will try to do Maiolino and her work some justice.

Because I don't think I can say it better; 'Seen as a whole, her work unfolds like a rhizomatic structure where all the different pieces, like semiotic steps charged with linguistic, perceptive, social, gestural and cognitive acts establish transversal connections with each other.' Wow, lets be honest I could not say that in any of the words I have.

But I do understand what the curator means; Maiolino is constantly challenging her medium, asking for new ways to communicate and experimenting with the boundaries between mediums in order to express the inexpressible. Her 'Mental Maps' and 'Secret poems' play with the powers of visual linguistics. Words can be read in any direction, as associations and voids. Locating and mapping words leads to the emergence of a narrative of the artist's life.

Experimenting with paper and ink in Marcas de Gota 2, Maiolino describes herself as 'Like a ship's captain at the helm, I move the drawings decisively in the air' so that the ink moves about the paper to make Rorschach ink blots where I find incidental letters and objects. That is the other notable thing about Maiolino; she is engaged with words. A lot of the information in the gallery is written by her, she can explain her working practice, which is a skill not every artist can claim.

Her sculptures in clay explore the organic qualities of her material; a huge landscape of thumbed clay fills an entire wall as though it were a child's obsessive experiment. The entire first floor is filled with earth colours; three tables are laid out like production benches in a pasta factory with identical clay shapes laid out. The works from the 70's explore absences and spaces. Rips and holes in paper and in rocks gape as if she is reaching towards something incommunicable.

In her photography Maiolino becomes more blatantly political. She describes a 'difficult moment for Brazil' where 'fear had gripped the country' and people were 'blindfolded'. Her photographs and portraits speak out against this blindness in their gesture towards self-mutilation.

In her Super8 films she creates what she calls 'photopoemaction' , articulating a 'totally new alphabet of images' (everything she writes is poetry.). She says that she tries to find in the 'act of poetic freedom a resistance to the establishment'. This is the problem with Maiolino, that I have to step down and admit that words defeat me, although they have not defeated her.

ARTchitecture for the Art Gallery

Perhaps it is just that my eye has only recently become interested in architecture, but the space in which art galleries were housed in Barcelona amazed and excited me as independent works of art.

Eventually the old streets of art shops and restaurants spilling out on to the pavements opened out to the Placa de Angels, an open space of art and a clear white light. MACBA is the Museum of Contemporary art in Barcelona and commands a whole square of converted spaces. Richard Meier was the American architect responsible for the main building, famous for his rationalist designs and his use of white, this is a blinding construction.

'Abstraction allows architecture to express its own organizational and spatial consequences, it permits the creation of space without confusing its volume with any superimposed system of meaning or value.' Richard Meier

I spent forever in awe, circling and encircling as I held my camera up to the sky and framed new shapes, discovered hidden geometries. The building frames and channels light, patterning, creating and distorting, utterly absorbing. Its great white surfaces obliterate the sun and draw everything towards it. I was genuinely captivated and wonder if it is that I have never seen architecture like this before, or that I have just never noticed it?

Here is an amazing video, which expresses the detailed abstract qualities of the building:

Here are some of the other impressive gallery buildings I saw.

Crowned by a barbed wire sculpture, Antoni Tapies designed the building which now hosts his gallery himself. The wire called 'Cloud and Chair' is supposed to adjust the difference in height between the Foundation and the buildings which surround it.

In 1975 architect Josep Luis Sert completed the building for the Joan Miro Foundation and modern art gallery. It was conceived as an open space and the white surfaces, broken by courtyards, do open up spaces. The highlight is the low roof which is open to the public to explore the sculptures which spill out of the museum.

When I went nobody seemed to be going out on to the roof, but I pushed through the tinted doors and escaped in to the sun to explore. Nobody stopped me and it felt liberating!

Texture and Tapies

Like Vicky in Vicky Cristina Barcelona I found myself doing a little research in to Catalan artists while I was in Barcelona. I think that is potentially one of the most annoying things I have written, ever, because I found that film and all of its inane attempts at cultural immersion very annoying. Did you know that Woody Allen didn't know any Spanish music before his film so his soundtrack was just a selection of chance discoveries? I don't think that says anything meaningful about his creative practice, it just explains the hollow, fickleness of his film. Anyway this is not supposed to be a rant about Woody Allen, it is about my discovery of Tapies.

Tapies struck me with his vast, textural landscapes of canvases which attack and arrest the viewer. Tapies is part of the school of materie painting or Art Informel which is interested in the materials of painting. In a world where artists are continually abstracted from that original medium of paint and canvas this return to the fecund possibilities of paint and its textural richness is refreshing.

Tapies' work draws you in to that earthy dream world where paint has the power to create and destroy. Using stone, sand and other bits of detritus his canvases become tactile landscapes. I got in trouble the other day for comparing Tapies with a contemporary Spanish Artist, Miquel Barcelo. Barcelo is less abstract, his work combines the organic qualities of paint with organic forms, but it plays with paint in the same liberal and confident way.

Are they comparable?