Besides participating in various exhibitions, including most notably Elas: mulheres artistas no acervo do MAB-Faap, in São Paulo, Gráfica Latinoamericana y del Caribe, in Beijing, and the Southern Hemisphere International Printmaking Exhibition (Passage), in Seoul, Bonomi produced important works such as Popessuara, consisting of laser-cut pieces of stainless steel for the commemorative album of the 100th anniversary of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo. She also made the trophy for the Associação Brasileira dos Críticos de Arte.

She furthermore put together academic and consulting panels for stage settings and costumes she created for the theater play Diálogos de Salomé com São João Batista, directed by Sergio Ferrara at the Teatro Sergio Cardoso. Since 2014 Maria has been involved in the research for a book concerning her production written by art critic and historian Mayra Laudanna of the Universidade de São Paulo.

An important reference work, A Dialética Maria Bonomi, published in Switzerland by Éditions du Griffon, presents an artist who “emerges as one of the most important exponents of Brazilian and international art in the second half of the 20th century,” in the words of the likewise USP professor and director of the Biblioteca Mário de Andrade, Luiz Armando Bagolin.

For the philosopher, “Maria Bonomi is perhaps the only case of an artist who lived in the same milieu and saw at firsthand many developments of the artistic avant-gardes from the end of the 1950s onward, and yet not did join any of them – not the abstractions, not the artificial pop trends, nor the new realisms. She remained faithful to both xilogravura [wood engraving] and xilografia [wood printing], terms she coined herself to denote unfoldings of her attitude at the moment of engraving the wood, later employed in other materials: synthetics, metals, clay, etc.” For Luiz Armando Bagolin, Maria Bonomi’s work is manifested, in the city, in a very striking and lofty way, always being related to the context she seeks to re-signify.

Besides the book, published in three volumes (English, French and Portuguese), she also presented a show featuring 14 of her works at the headquarters of the publisher in Neuchâtel, coincidentally the city where the artist held her first international exhibition, in 1955.

The artist’s close relationship with universities coupled with her extensive dedication to the teaching and research of arts in Brazil brought her an honor from the most important agency for the fostering of research in São Paulo. In 2015, Fapesp invited Bonomi to compose its report of activities with images of part of her oeuvre, commented on by Professor Teixeira Coelho. Besides the publication, the honor was complemented by a solo show at the institution’s headquarters.

That same year, in Rio de Janeiro, the artist also bestowed an honor – on her friend, Brazilian popular music singer Maria Bethânia. For the show Maria de Todos Nós, Bonomi created La Chanson, a striking, colored woodcut: intense, just like the singer.

Invited by the International Biennial of Graphic Arts of Guanlan, China, to take part in the Guanlan Original Printmaking Base workshop, together with a group of selected international printmakers for a period of 45 days, Maria Bonomi worked on a series of new images in which she updated themes she had worked on previously while reinventing artistic propositions.

At the exhibition Arte na Moda: Coleção Masp Rhodia, the artist participated with an unusual work, in which she made a print on a dress made in the 1970s, recovered by the museum under the curatorship of Tomás Toledo.

Maria Bonomi’s creative drive was clearly manifested in 2014 in the installation Circumstantiam. Commissioned by Sesc, the artist installed in the large multi-floor spacious lobby of Sesc Belenzinho an artwork that radicalized the ideas that have always been part of her oeuvre: grandiosity and reproducibility. The work – which involved 15 woodcuts on a total of 21 quadrants measuring 4 x 4 meters each, together with cables and suspended mirrors, executed on recyclable paper and biodegradable aluminum – is an example of an ephemeral work to be distributed in a public space after it is taken apart, as was done in the case of Infecção da Memória [Infection of Memory], a work of 2005.

Circumstantiam, an artwork that refers to questions concerning the environmental preservation and pollution of our planet, was unique not so much for its dimensions and ephemerality, but for its requiring the spectator to walk through the space, observing the artwork from various points within the building, including from inside the complex’s swimming pool, located under a glass ceiling through which one can see the reflections of the prints digitally transposed to the colossal sheets of paper.

But since for the artist engraving is always a ceaseless mutation, after the installation was taken apart, Bonomi reused various of the engravings for the corridors of the República Subway Station. Later, the ones not used previously were taken to the train station in São Caetano do Sul, thus presenting them to a wider audience.

That same year, Bonomi inaugurated a public artwork in Bahia, installed in the innovative architectural complex of the Mozarteum Brasileiro in Trancoso. According to the artist, that work composed of two bronze panels commemorated the discovery of Brazil, “the flora and fauna in the magical bluffs along the seashore, sculpting two plaques in low relief, 3.70 x 2.50 meters and weighing 400 kilograms each. They were embedded in the giant triangular gaps in the façade of the building by François Valentiny, designed for 1,200 people” (sponsored by L’Occitane).

In theater, from Bahia to Rio, from the wall to the stage, the versatile artist’s work is always linked to questions that pervade the art world, as when she created the stage settings and costumes for the play Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas e Pablo Picasso, presented at Teatro Leblon, which is known for offering a space for reflections on the role of the avant-garde in the construction of modern thought – whether artistic or behavioral.

For the important role she has played in cultural questions of Brazil and the city of São Paulo, Maria Bonomi was nominated by the then city councilmember Andrea Matarazzo for the highest honor of City Hall: the title of São Paulo City Citizen, conferred to her by unanimous vote. In the words of the former Brazilian ambassador in Rome: “The artist’s legacy for her adopted city is immense […] She has inscribed her name in the history of São Paulo based on works in the field of public art, […] creating references that bring together and guide the population.”

Since the first decade of the 2000s, in celebration of the more than 60 years of her career, Maria Bonomi inaugurated a series of solo shows, coordinated by Maria Helena Peres Oliveira, in which she presented a selection of her most important works. At those shows, held at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo in 2008, in Gallery 32 of London in 2009, at the CCBB of Brasília in 2011, at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine of Paris in 2012, and at the Circulo de Bellas Artes of Madrid in 2013, Bonomi continued to demonstrate all of her quality and energy, since, besides showing artworks that evidenced the importance of her career path begun in the 1950s, she also showed recent works.

The year 2013 was also important for a less well-known yet nonetheless important aspect of the artist. Maria Bonomi has always been connected with the discussions concerning the cultural and artistic politics of the city of São Paulo and other states in Brazil. Whether by following the conversations and negotiations that founded many of the cultural institutions of São Paulo, including the Bienal de São Paulo, or by engaging in the debate about access to art or artistic professionalization, or concerning the role of galleries in the Brazilian art world, throughout her career, Bonomi has become a referential figure in the national art scene. Not by chance, she has taken part in countless commissions and councils of important Brazilian institutions, such as those of MAM, the Pinacoteca, MASP, OSESP, the Associação Internacional dos Artistas Plásticos, the Sindicato dos Artistas Plásticos, Instituto Lina Bo e P. M. Bardi, Fundação Bunge, and others.

Navegar é Preciso [Sailing is Necessary] is a public artwork, cast in bronze, made on the basis of the prow of a ship that sailed through 2012 and came to port, gleaming, in the gardens of the Palácio dos Bandeirantes, the headquarters of the São Paulo State Government.

This uneasy and pioneering spirit, which has always accompanied Maria Bonomi, was what led her to expand her art to new audiences. From Brazil to France, crossing the Atlantic Ocean and disembarking in Paris, the artist presented a solo show at the Maison de l’Amérique Latine. Traveling from the French capital to Slovenia, she participated in the important collective exhibition The Big Ones!, an artistic contest that sought to present and discuss the insertion of large-scale artworks in the field of graphic arts worldwide, featuring artists who played a key and revolutionary role in this aspect, as did Maria Bonomi, who since the 1960s occupied the walls of the Paris Biennale with prints that surpassed the usual dimensions for the genre.

Criação Incessante [Ceaseless Creation] was the theme and catalog title that oriented the curatorship of Jorge Coli in the most complete solo show held by Maria Bonomi, featuring more than 300 works at the CCBB of Brasília, including works made in her childhood. It was an exhibition of great impact, especially for including a series of works shown there for the first time, the result of Bonomi’s unflagging dedication to her art. The novelties included artworks she made in a foray into digital art after an experience in San Francisco with leading practitioners of this innovative graphic language: Cairo January, Trozo and Lena are examples. Indeed, a bold and transformative spirit has always guided Maria Bonomi in her artistic incursions in a wide range of different artistic languages.

Besides this distinguishing experimentation with digital media, in that same year she also produced outstanding work in the field of artisanal engraving, producing the woodcut A Ponte [The Bridge]. A monumental work, larger than 1.70 x 2.60 m, it was described in by Jorge Coli in his text about the installation the artist made by multiplying the waves under the bridge, proliferating them along the wall in the series Águas Sólidas [Solid Waters], in objects cut from steel sheets by laser. Despite the praise by the professor from Unicamp, it was not until 2015 that his colleague Teixeira Coelho posed A Ponte as a metaphor of the artist herself and her career. According to the professor from USP, looking at the engraving “does good for the eyes and for the soul,” since it is an example of an “art the size of the world.”

Also according to Teixeira Coelho, in light of this woodcut, “Maria redefined engraving by avoiding the intimist, shy, somber and nearly painful scenario of naturalist engraving, preferring instead to use large-scale dimensions and color in order to impart to this language various perspectives of a thrilling world. In more than one field of art, the ode is the form for an artist to express his or her pleasure and enthusiasm for art and life: the same word eloquently defines Maria Bonomi’s eloquence, a continuous ode to life and to the world, something that becomes more evident in the informal setting of her studio than in the well-ordered and very well-behaved atmosphere of an exhibition at a museum or gallery.”

It was based on this transformative idea that Bonomi created, in 2010, the artworks Favela and Paris Rilton. In the former, cast in aluminum, the artist points to a civic dimension of her work, while in the latter she ironically approaches an aspect of behavioral banality. Paris Rilton is a piece cast in bronze, iron and aluminum, grooved by the artist’s own refinement, displayed on top of mirrors. In the upper surface there is an orifice through which one can take out the most unexpected futilities of feminine beautification, in a clear reference to the vacuousness of some leading media figures, including the socialite heiress of one of the largest hotel chains in the world. The sculpture is accompanied by an experimental video made by Walter Silveira which illustrates the proposal anecdotally.

After five days of nonstop work in the studio of Fundação Iberê Camargo, with master printer Eduardo Haesbaert, in Porto Alegre, Bonomi made two engravings, one in homage to the great painter, Hommage a Iberê Camargo, and the other inspired not only by the institution’s studio room, whose atmosphere reminded the artist of the tale by Borges, but above all by the idea of the extreme contrast of the trees seen through the window of the room in relation to the white walls: Aleph is the title of an engraving in metal that refers to a beginning through reference to the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet, while also alluding to the universe, following the fantastic imagination of the Argentine writer.

In this year of 2009, Maria Bonomi took part in international exhibitions, most notably including the solo show held at Gallery 32 in London, presented by Marcelo Araújo, as well as her participation at the Biennale Internazionale Dell'Arte Contemporanea di Firenze, for which she received a grand prize.

Besides dedicating herself to international shows, the engraver also focused on her artistic production and produced the sculpture in cast aluminum Amor Inscrito [Inscribed Love]. According to Bonomi, the grooves of this work, engraved in plaster, re-create the experiences of acts of love. A singular work, Amor Inscrito results from a myriad of technical possibilities: on the one hand the artist works on the solidification of aluminum in the carved-out elements, inverting the logic of the groove, on the other, she extracts the artistic object from the lined material. According to Ana Maria Belluzzo: “Maria Bonomi’s artworks spring from the densification of experience. And the process of their development includes transformations, superpositions and resumptions on the basis of new perspectives, setbacks and advances.”

That year of 2009 also saw the beginning of a new effort aimed at the preservation of Maria Bonomi’s artistic memory. Maria Helena Peres Oliveira instated and began to coordinate an institution aimed at concentrating the most significant part of Bonomi’s artistic production, as well as the extensive body of critical texts that have been written about them, through the organization of a bibliographic data bank and the constitution of an archive of artworks and matrices. The firm Atelier Maria Bonomi Ltda was established as a fundamental center for the production and dissemination of the artist’s work and for engraving in general, equipped with all the tools needed for the three main techniques of engraving, as well as a high temperature furnace and a commercial relations department, responsible for the sale and lending of the artworks.

On the invitation of Oscar Niemeyer, the experience of collective art was repeated and re-signified in the project Etnias: do Primeiro e Sempre Brasil [Ethnicities: Of the First and Forever Brazil] a work installed in the tunnel between São Paulo’s subway system and the Memorial da América Latina. The project is centered on the theme of the Brazilian Indians and the entire process of aculturation and destruction that they suffered throughout 500 years of history. Besides a large team of artists and technicians, the execution of the work relied on the participation of Guarani Indians, representing the villages located in the environs of São Paulo and in other regions of Brazil. The result of an intense research into texts by Darcy Ribeiro and a vast collection of colonial iconography, the panel seeks to direct the passerby’s gaze to questions related to the indigenous contribution to Brazilian culture in three phases, engraved in clay and transformed into ceramic, bronze and aluminum. The first segment represents the indigenous territory and culture before the Portuguese occupation, the second relates to European and native elements, showing how the travelers saw the indigenous Americans, while the third refers to the current scene, casting a questioning light on the destruction of the Brazilian Indians.

Also in 2008, Maria Bonomi was the special invited artist at the X Bienal do Recôncavo and held two large solo shows, one at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, presented by Ana Maria Belluzzo, and the other at the Centre de la Gravure et de l'Image Imprimée, in Brussels, organized by Catherine de Braekeleer. About the latter exhibition, the director of the Belgian center wrote: “Maria Bonomi’s artistic approach is composed of multiple facets: through permanent contact with the material that she attacks and grinds in a fundamentally organic and sensorial gesture, the artist makes rhythms appear in her matrices whose profound and sensual vibrations resound in a graphic exultation; this lyrical approach is coupled with a civic and humanitarian dimension that finds its full flourishing in various creations of public art.”

Concerning Bonomi’s large solo exhibition Gravura Peregrina, held at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2008, Ana Maria Belluzzo wrote that “for Maria it is always time to play. Symbolic games, in which the landscapes constructed by the gaze come together with interior places. Games of feeling operated at the moment of cutting the shape, at the moment of its printing. It is the time of moving, stirring, shifting to a new position, displacing, transporting the technique of engraving to other materials and supports. Playing with and sabotaging the rules of the game. Just as Maria plays with the matrices of printmaking, she also plays with words. The names given to her pieces do not predefine the artworks, but rather converse with them.”

Plexus is an artwork cast in aluminum whose grooves allude to feelings. The sculpture, installed in 2013 at Praça Oswaldo Cruz, at the beginning of São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista, is a representation of love. According to the artist, Plexus “is a sensorial experience in which I sought to reveal a body within the groove.”

The intensity of the impassioned carvings that mark the faces of the sculpture Plexus are multiplied, cut out, in Love Layers, a series of objects cast in bronze, brass and aluminum which, as the name indicates, particularizes sexuality.

De Viés was a solo show that Francisco Bosco presented at the Museu Oscar Niemeyer de Curitiba, with a significant set of works that the artist produced over the course of her career.

The long, productive path of her career is also the focus of the book Maria Bonomi: da Gravura à Arte Pública, by Mayra Laudanna and Leon Kossovitch published by Edusp and the Imprensa Oficial. A fundamental work for understanding the artist’s oeuvre, in particular, and the history of art in Brazil, in general, the publication presents Bonomi as one of Brazil’s key artists, especially in regard to the discussions on public art. Divided into three chapters, the book presents the artist’s doctoral thesis, defended at the Universidade de São Paulo, “Arte-Pública: Sistema Expressivo/Anterioridade,” where she proposes art as a starting point for the full development of citizenship. Complementing the thesis, there is an artistic timeline and an article, insightfully written by the authors.

According to Teixeira Coelho: “Reading and looking at this book is an occasion on which to remember, also, that Bonomi is one of the key players in Brazilian and international art. That is not a role for just anyone. Notwithstanding the upsurge of her award-winning presence on the international scene, she never forgot about Brazil and what was at play here, as shown by her participation, during the dictatorship, in the boycott of the 1969 Bienal de São Paulo and her skirmishes with the Bienal during the 1990s under Collor and his politics for the destruction of the cultural scene. A big book, it is nonetheless a light one that ends with an ‘artistic narrative,’ authored by the editor and by Leon Kossovitch, which presents a sort of investigative timeline that can be more effective than a great deal of theoretical study. At first sight, the book may appear too fragmented and informal for an artist of this significance and with the immense life of Maria Bonomi to be shown fully and engagingly. It could have been a bilingual book: outside Brazil they need to know more about an artist who is as much from here as from there. They need it and would like it.”

Charged with the fervor of the crack soccer player, ripping though the wood and constructing the line, Maria Bonomi advanced the wandering geometry of her groove, tracing the parallel of the impossible, creating a very essential woodcut, Gool!!!, presenting a slice of the emotion of a shot into the goal and the culmination of the soccer player’s finesse, in keeping with the aim of Rio de Janeiro composer Chico Buarque. To the amazed delight of soccer fans in Germany, Bonomi and ten other invited artists brought the true art of Brazilian soccer to the Brazilian Embassy at the exhibition Os Onze – Futebol e Arte, a Copa da Cultura.

In that World Cup year, the artist herself won a victory, though in another field, and was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Ipiranga Order by the then São Paulo State Governor Cláudio Lembo.

An outstanding printmaker, Bonomi was an honored artist at the II Bienal Internacional Ceará de Gravura where she participated with a room dedicated exclusively to her work.

Developing possibilities for public art, she reproduced in aluminum the panel entitled Eroscopia [Eroscope], originally produced in concrete in 1990 for a residence in São Paulo.

In this year, Maria Bonomi traveled the world, showing her work at dozens of venues, at solo shows and collective exhibitions in Brazil and abroad. At Museo de Huelva, she held the exhibition María Bonomi. Vestida de Luz, Cubierta de Blanco, para Viajar por el Mundo, curated by Samir Assaleh, which shed light on the printmaker’s overall oeuvre and emphasized the importance of her traveling in search of the dream and beauty. Her colors were the highlight, along with the immensity of her prints, which drew droves of visitors on the Spanish plains as well as in the distant Oriental lands. In China, the artist participated in the Second Beijing International Art Biennial, and resumed a profound artistic relationship with the country, begun in the 1970s with the series Transamazônica e China [Trans-Amazonian and China].

Those trips the artist took in search of the dream and beauty provided not only the substance for engravings, but also the essence of the stage settings and costumes she made for the play written by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão and directed by Sérgio Ferrara, A Última Viagem de Borges, a theatrical event sponsored by SESC that opened the Festival de Cinema de Curitiba, with subsequent presentations in São Paulo.

The artist also honored Bahian composer Dorival Caymmi in her work: the woodcut Sábado em Copacabana [Saturday in Copacabana] had great impact at the show A Imagem do Som, presented in various Brazilian state capitals.

In the period spanning between the pieces dedicated to the Borges and Caymmi, respectively, Maria Bonomi collaborated in many collective projects, demonstrating once again that art is a collective action and should therefore be socialized. It was in this vein – which has always guided her artistic career – that Bonomi conceived the Atelier Amarelo. A collective studio installed in 2005 in downtown São Paulo, in partnership with the State Secretariat of Culture, this artistic workshop allowed its resident artists, chosen through a selection process, to propose social and poetic reflections about the city. During the three terms of the Atelier Amarelo’s activity, more than two dozen artists were able to deepen their artistic knowledge and broaden their network of professional and artistic contacts. Artists who participated in the project most notably include Fabrício Lopez and Henrique de Oliveira.

Born in Meina, village located on the shores of Lake Maggiore, near Milan, in July 1935, Brazilian mother, Georgina Martinelli Bonomi, and Italian father, Ambrógio Bonomi.