From 25 March to 31 August, MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology will stage the work of Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino in its spectacular Oval Gallery.

Poetic Earth features an intense dialogue with the material that has anchored Maiolino’s work since the late 1980s: earth itself. Her clay sculptures oscillate between rupture and control. In the Terra Modelada series, terracotta swells, folds and spills outward, one piece uncannily akin to a tube of toothpaste forced out in a single, urgent gesture, as if the body had pressed itself directly into matter.

By contrast, in ERRÂNCIA POÉTICA (POETIC WANDERINGS), discipline prevails. Modular forms are shaped and set in ordered sequences, aligned with almost industrial precision. Here repetition becomes cadence, and the act of making, once explosive, settles into something closer to ritual, where labour transforms into contemplation.

For the Lisbon museum, Maiolino will create a new body of work on site, the largest sculptures she has ever produced, shifting her vocabulary into a new register of scale. Expect mass, weight, density. Expect the hand multiplied.

The exhibition also looks back. Drawings, photographs and videos from the 1970s and ’80s trace the conceptual and political foundations of her sculptural language. Developed against the backdrop of Brazil’s military dictatorship, these early works positioned the body, at the centre of her thinking.

Clay dries, cracks, settles. Maiolino tells us that art can be squeezed from the body or assembled with patience. In her hands, earth is never neutral. It is memory, resistance, and an insistence on being here.

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