Director, Glenn Lowry: Alexandra Schwartz, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Drawings.
Curator, Alexandra Schwartz: Anna Maria Maiolino is a Brazilian artist. She started off really as a painter and sculptor, also doing printmaking.
Often she would use paper to make what is really a kind of sculpture, and the works that we have here are part of that for her.
This piece, the English title is Black Hole, is part of her drawings/object series from around 1971 to 1976. It's made out of paper. But she's torn the paper and layered it so that it becomes a three dimensional object, literally a black hole. There's a lot of play of shadow, light and dark. And it also has this very abstract reference to the body. That has a kind of sexual quality to it.
Glenn Lowry: Nearby you’ll see Maiolino’s Trajetoraia I & II.
Alexandra Schwartz: You see again that she's using torn paper, and she's also using thread, in a very inventive way, literally threading together the sheets of paper, so that when it's opened and displayed, it becomes a kind of sculpture. She's using geometric forms, very basic colors, black, white and red, which are colors you see throughout so much abstract art, going back all the way through the 20th century. And she does a kind of alchemy where she takes two-dimensional materials, and turns them into this three dimensional book object.