About
The Baroque always connects two extremes, like light and shadow, in one body, one painting. History outside against a wild body inside, cultured and uncultured, cooked and uncooked, greed and expressionism, rationalism and irrationality, cold and hot.
—Adriana Varejão
In her richly diverse oeuvre, Adriana Varejão uses the Baroque tactics of simulation, juxtaposition, and parody to reflect on the mythic pluralism of Brazilian identity and the complex social, cultural, and aesthetic interactions that produced it. Varejão draws upon a potent visual legacy animated by the histories of colonialism and transnational exchange to create a confluence of hybridized forms—paintings that are both architectural and sculptural; theatrical, painted sculptures; mesmerizing multichannel videos—that expose the multivalent nature of memory and representation.
Varejão was born in Rio de Janeiro. She attended the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage from 1983 to 1985. In 1986 she began to experiment with the medium of oil painting, reimagining in thick impasto the ornate Baroque frescoes and religious relics of the eighteenth-century churches in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
In 1992, Varejão spent three months traveling in China, where she studied Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) ceramics and classical Chinese landscape painting. From that journey, she began to consider how Eurocentric narratives distort or even erase the histories of various artistic methods and motifs, and subsequently embarked on a series of paintings in which familiar iconography—maps, religious imagery, colonial genre scenes—is interrupted with simulated bloody gashes and fleshy extrusions, or more subtle narrative subversions. Her work from this period makes explicit reference to the violence and eroticism of Brazilian history in the spirit of antropofagia, a key concept in Brazilian modernism that reclaims the anthropophagic rituals of the Tupi people, transforming the social taboo of cannibalism into a symbolic totem of cultural absorption in postcolonial Brazil.
Upon her return from China, Varejão began collecting examples of regional Brazilian folk art such as ex-votos and azulejos, glazed terra-cotta tiles of Arab origin that have been the most widely used form of decoration in Portuguese national art since the Middle Ages. Fascinated by the azulejo and its legacy in Brazil as a metaphor for both forced and voluntary cultural miscegenation, Varejão developed her Azulejão (Big Tile) paintings (1988–). For the support, she applies a thick layer of viscous plaster to a canvas laid flat; as the plaster slowly dries, the cracks that form produce a cartography of deep surface fissures. While the early Azulejão paintings, featuring fragments of larger schema, were often arranged in vast grids of disrupted narrative, the larger-scale singular works of more recent years present seismic surfaces, at once abstract, geological, and corporeal.
Photo: Vicente de Mello
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Exhibitions
Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now
To celebrate the publication of Phaidon’s new, expansive survey, we share an excerpt from Raphael Fonseca’s introduction and a few of the more than three hundred artists featured.
Adriana Varejão Selects
To coincide with the release of the first English-language monograph on the career of Adriana Varejão—in which her diverse body of work is explored in depth, from her earliest paintings in the 1990s to her most recent multimedia installations—the artist has curated a selection of films as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph in the theater and online. The program features cinema exploring themes of eroticism, excess, and science-fiction fatalism.
Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
Adriana Varejão: For a Poetics of Difference
Curator Luisa Duarte considers the artist’s oeuvre, writing on Varejão’s active engagement with theories of difference, as well as the cultural specters of the past.
Work in Progress
Adriana Varejão: In the Studio
Join Adriana Varejão at her studio in Rio de Janeiro as she prepares for her upcoming exhibition at Gagosian in New York. She speaks about the inspirations for her “tile” paintings, from Portuguese azulejos to the Brazilian Baroque to the Talavera ceramic tradition of Mexico, and reveals for the first time her unique process for creating these works.
For Sale: Baby Shoes. Never Worn.
Sydney Stutterheim meditates on the power and possibilities of small-format artworks throughout time.
Adriana Varejão: Transbarroco
From October 19 to 21, 2017, Adriana Varejão’s video installation Transbarroco (2014) played across the façade and in the central courtyard of the historic John Sowden House, designed by Lloyd Wright in 1926.
Adriana Varejão: Interiors
Lilia Moritz Schwarcz explores themes that are central to the artist’s oeuvre.
Adriana Varejão: Azulejão
Gagosian director Louise Neri discusses the evolution of the Azulejão series with Adriana Varejão.
Fairs, Events & Announcements
Exhibition
Adriana Varejão in
Bienal das Amazônias
August 4–November 5, 2023
Various locations in Belém, Brazil
www.bienalamazonias.com.br
The inaugural Bienal das Amazônias brings contemporary art to the unique surroundings of Belém, in the northern state of Pará in Brazil. It aims to conceive artistic, educational, and socio-environmental actions and develop Pan-Amazonian audiences. Seeking to reflect how art is made in the region without resorting to stereotypes, the biennial includes work by more than 120 artists and collectives from eight countries surrounding the Amazon. Work by Adriana Varejão is included.
Adriana Varejão, Mucura, 2023 © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Vicente de Mello
Talk and Book Signing
Adriana Varejão
Louise Neri
Thursday, November 17, 2022, 6pm
Rizzoli Bookstore, New York
www.rizzolibookstore.com
Adriana Varejão will be in conversation with Gagosian director Louise Neri to celebrate the publication of the artist’s first English-language monograph, published by Rizzoli Electa, in association with Gagosian. Edited by Neri, the fully illustrated volume explores Varejao’s diverse body of work in depth and organizes her oeuvre into several conceptual groupings: “Cartographies,” “Antropofagia,” “Mestizaje,” “Baroque,” “Sauna and Baths,” and “Azulejo.” After the talk, Varejão will sign copies of the book, which will be available to purchase at the event.
Adriana Varejão (New York: Rizzoli Electa, in association with Gagosian, 2022)
Screening
Adriana Varejão Selects
October 21–30, 2022
Metrograph, New York
metrograph.com
Adriana Varejão has curated a selection of films as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph in the theater and online. The program will feature cinema exploring themes of eroticism, excess, and science-fiction fatalism.
Varejão explains: “With these screenings, I’m taking a poetic approach, bringing together films that have opened doors in my art. . . . These aspects are present in my own art in the representations of flesh, in the imagined environments, in the historical parodies. The program also includes more recent remarkable Brazilian productions that resonate with my own thinking.”
Still from Bacurau (2019), directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Museum Exhibitions
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Adriana Varejão in
Souvenirs of the Future
October 26, 2023–April 28, 2024
Pera Museum, Istanbul
www.peramuseum.org
Souvenirs of the Future brings together a selection of commissioned contemporary works inspired by the Suna and İnan Kıraç Foundation’s Kütahya Tiles and Ceramics Collection, exploring the ties forged between memory and imagination. The exhibition examines the meaning, and cultural and symbolic value, of objects that have been collected as souvenirs or personal reminders of certain places and times. Work by Adriana Varejão is included.
Adriana Varejão, Azulejaria “de tapete” sobre telas (Carpet Style Tilework on Canvases), 1999 © Adriana Varejão
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Adriana Varejão in
Siamo Foresta
June 22–October 29, 2023
Triennale di Milano, Milan
triennale.org
This exhibition, whose title translates to We Are Forest, is a partnership between the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris, and the Triennale di Milano, and is held in Milan. The show draws its inspiration from an aesthetic and political vision of the forest as an egalitarian multiverse of living beings—both human and nonhuman. It offers an allegory of a possible world beyond our own, and stages an encounter between thinkers and defenders of the forest, Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists. Work by Adriana Varejão is included.
Adriana Varejão, Cadernos de viagem: Yãkoana, 2003 © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Patrick Grie
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Adriana Varejão
Suturas, fissuras, ruínas
March 26–August 1, 2022
Pinacoteca de São Paulo
pinacoteca.org.br
This retrospective, whose title translates to Sutures, Fissures, Ruins, is the most comprehensive solo exhibition of Adriana Varejão’s work to date. Curated by Jochen Volz, director of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, it gathers together more than sixty works in two and three dimensions made between 1985 and 2022. From her position as both a postcolonial subject and a contemporary painter, Varejão brings an insistent critical scrutiny to bear on the enduring impact of European history, its iconography, and artistic conventions. The exhibition highlights the subversive strategies and their symptoms that have underscored Varejão’s art practice since her Baroque canvases of the early 1990s.
Installation view, Adriana Varejão: Suturas, fissuras, ruínas, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, March 26–August 1, 2022. Artwork © Adriana Varejão
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Adriana Varejão in
Composições para tempos insurgentes
October 9, 2021–May 8, 2022
Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro
mam.rio
This exhibition, whose title translates to Compositions for Insurgent Times, highlights a multigenerational group of artists who strategically and poetically address the relationship between nature and culture in their work. The exhibition aims to prompt discussions about sustainable urban architecture, questions of diversity and accessibility, and Afro-Brazilian and Western traditions brought together to exercise new ways of building and relating to the world. Work by Adriana Varejão is included.
Adriana Varejão, Ruína Brasilis (Brasilis Ruin), 2021 © Adriana Varejão