La award ceremony with the Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement to Anna Maria Maiolino and Nil Yalter and the inauguration of the 2024 Art Biennale will be held on Saturday 20 April 2024 a Ca 'Giustinian, home of the Venice Biennale. The exhibition will open to the public on the same day at 11 am. Both artists will participate in the Biennale Arte for the first time in 2024: Maiolino with a new large work who continues and develops the series of his clay sculptures and installations; Yalter with a reconfiguration of his innovative installation Exile is a hard job, together with his iconic work Topak Ev, placed in the first room of the Central Pavilion.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Anna Maria Maiolino was born on 20 May 1942 in Scalea, in Italy, and then emigrated with his family to Caracas, Venezuela in 1954, a few years after the Second World War. There he studied at the Escuela de Artes Visuales Cristóbal Rojas, between 1958 and 1960, the year in which he moved to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where he attended the free courses in painting, sculpture and woodcut at the Escola Nacional de Belas Artes. She goes on to dedicate herself to this technique which allows her to connect with the popular woodcut practiced in north-eastern Brazil; she will use it for several years precisely because it is imbued with social criticism.
The artist declares himself self-taught
Through frequenting the Escola de Belas Artes and the artists of Rio, Maiolino became part of the well-known Brazilian artistic movement called Nova Figuração, a reaction to the abstraction of the Sixties contaminated by pop inflections, which also reflected the harsh political climate of the country during the first years of the military dictatorship (1964-1985). In that period Maiolino continued to develop his own language and skills, attending the famous art courses held by Ivan Serpa (1923-1973) at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. In 1964 he held his first solo exhibition at Galeria G in Caracas and in 1967 he participated in the historic Nova Objetividade Brasileira exhibition in Rio de Janeiro. Between 1968 and 1971 Maiolino lived in New York. In his last year, following the recommendation of Luis Camnitzer, he received a scholarship at The Pratt Graphics Center and practiced the technique of metal engraving and etching, broadening his artistic horizons to various media and experimental poetry. His paintings and engravings from the 1960s are quite radical, as they combine pop imagery with the typical repertoire of Nova Figuração, focusing on political characters and narratives, as well as personal, corporeal and family references. Between the Seventies and Eighties Maiolino began to dedicate himself to performance art and, in 1981, he staged his surprising Entrevidas, in which dozens of eggs are scattered on the floor and challenge the artist to travel through the space as if it were a "field undermined”, taking into account the fragility and precariousness of the egg, symbol of life itself. At the beginning of the nineties he began working with clay, signaling a new attention to gestural and sensorial expression, the handmade and the relationship with the material earth, clay, elementary materials in sculptures and reliefs which last until till today. For the 60. International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale Maiolino will present a new large-scale work that continues and develops the series of clay sculptures and installations. This will be his first participation in the Biennale Arte. Over the course of her career, Anna Maria Maiolino has held numerous major and retrospective exhibitions, including those at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in Sao Paulo (2022), at the PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea in Milan, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London ( 2019), at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (2017), at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona (2010) and at the Drawing Center in New York (2002). He participated, among other things, in the Lyon Biennial (2017), the Gwangju Biennial (2014), the Sao Paulo Biennial (2010, 1998, 1991, 1994, 1967), the Sydney Biennial (2008) and the Havana Biennial (1984). His works are present in the collections of the Castello di Rivoli (Turin), the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles , of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, of the Tate in the United Kingdom.
Nil Yalter is a Turkish artist born in Cairo, in Egypt, on 15 January 1938 and moved to Paris in 1965, where she still lives. She is considered a pioneer of the global feminist art movement. Yalter has never received formal education in the field of visual arts and, as a self-taught artist, has conducted constant research into his own practices and areas of interest ranging from painting to drawing, video to sculpture to installation. His artistic career began in 1957, when he held his first exhibition at the French Cultural Institute in Mumbai, India. However, it was during the 1960s that he deepened his practice. After moving to Paris in 1965, Yalter's work inaugurated a truly radical and pioneering chapter, as she began to address social issues, particularly related to immigration and women's experiences, in a truly unique exploration and development of conceptual artistic practices. In 1973, Yalter created the innovative installation Topak Ev, exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. The following year she presented a fundamental video work, The Headless Woman, which addresses the theme of women's sexual liberation and the orientalist objectification of Middle Eastern women. Another singular work from 1974 is La Roquette, Prison de Femmes (made with Judy Blum and Nicole Croiset), which presents the testimonies of a former inmate of the famous French women's prison. Her work Temporary Dwellings, first exhibited in 1977, delves into the lives of migrant workers as told by women. In 1980 Yalter presented for the first time another very radical work, consisting of a personal video projection and a conference entitled Rahime, Femme Kurde de Turquie at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. The 1990s marked a period of creative exploration and recognition for Yalter, during which he experimented with digital media. on the occasion of the 60th. International Art Exhibition, Yalter will present a reconfiguration of his innovative installation Exile is a hard job, together with his iconic work Topak Ev (1973), located in the first room of the Central Pavilion of the Giardini. This will be the artist's first participation in the Biennale Arte. Nil Yalter has held retrospective and solo exhibitions at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, the Musée d'Art Contemporain du Val-de-Mame, France, the Musée d 'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, at the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris and in many other locations. He participated, among others, in the Sharjah Biennial (2023), the Berlin Biennial (2022), the Gwangju Biennial (2014), the Istanbul Biennial (2013), the Sao Paulo Biennial (1979), the of Paris (1977). Yalter's works are present in the collections of Istanbul Modern, the Center Pompidou in Paris, the FNAC Fonds National d'Art Contemporain in France, the Tate in the United Kingdom, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid and many others.
