The indissoluble relationship between art and life is at the heart of Ana Amorim’s practice. Since the 1980s, she has developed a body of work in which the movements of everyday life are recorded and registered with such rigor that there is no effective difference between being alive and making art. In this sense, she belongs within an artistic lineage that includes artists like Tehching Hsieh, On Kawara, Chris Burden, or Marina Abramovic. Ana Amorim developed her work in São Paulo, Brazil, the USA, UK, New Zealand, Australia, Spain, and other locations. Broadly speaking, her work consists of two distinct but related ongoing practices: Mental Maps in which she traces her daily movements from memory at the end of each day, and Passage of Time, in which she records each passing second with numbers and graphic marks.

In 1988, Amorim drafted her first important text: “Conceptual Decisions”, a manifesto in which she set the very strict terms for the production for the following ten years, including statements such as, “I would use inexpensive materials” or “I would not sell the work”. In 2001 she elaborated these ideas into a contract reflecting her beliefs in how her art should be shown. The terms were intentionally so onerous (for example no sponsorship by companies that produced environmental or social damage) that she effectively self-isolated from the commercial and not-for-profit art world. These terms were in place for almost two decades, during which time she continued to produce her work daily, but it was unknown outside a very small group of friends and supporters. She also sold no works during this period. As a result of this decision, her body of work is almost completely intact.

This solo presentation by Millan presents a single emblematic work: ”Large Canvas 4”, of 1991. This expansive and immersive work exemplifies her practice, bringing together the daily mental maps and also the counting of seconds to mark time. The work consists of 318 strips of cloth, in which she drew her daily trajectory, in black for everyday routes and red for new ones. Each strip also has a piece of fabric attached, cut from her immediate surroundings, while the bottom part shows her subjective registering of seconds for one hour. The work covers the walls of the booth, providing a powerful sense of her practice and its implications.

Amorim’s work crosses two important traditions in contemporary art practice. On the one hand the idea of art produced by instructions and contract, which dates back to Moholy-Nagy’s works ordered by telephone from the 1920s, but which came to maturity in Seth Siegelaub’s Artist’s Contract of 1970 in which the artist takes control of the distribution and circulation of his or her work. The other tradition is that of breaking down the divisions between the art world and everyday life, which also has its roots in avant-garde practice, but which was revitalized by The Situationist International, Fluxus, and other groups. Amorim builds on these traditions, while also incorporating the

element of embroidery and textile, adding a potential feminist reading to the work. By bringing together a strict conceptual practice with the ‘minor’ art of textile, she expands the traditional male field of conceptualist art into new areas.