Anna Maria Maiolino review – roll up for a witty surrealist sausage party

Whitechapel Gallery, London
Intended as a comment on the sort of dictorships she has lived though, the Brazilian artist’s subjugated phalluses and intriguing orifices are one great splurge of freedom

There are phallic images all over the place in Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino’s witty and weird show, but this is no triumph for the male member. Like a once cocksure prime minister, the sausages and worms of freshly shaped clay that open the show seem crestfallen. Long reddish-brown tubes are stacked up like dead fish. A clay salami has been chopped into slices. Look out for this artist and her knife.

Maiolino is a surrealist who finds the inner secrets of physical existence, while seducing the senses with frolicking lines and supple surfaces. Her subjugated willies are just the half of it. While snakes and chipolatas flop about uselessly, very vaginal-looking orifices lead the mind into hidden places. A series of sculptures made last year resemble cross-sections of a landscape that has been pockmarked and excavated by tiny tunnellers. Caverns open in the earth and lead to underground cities you can’t help trying to see into. These messy subterranean networks are halfway between a termite colony and a lost South American civilisation.

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