Adriana Varejão: Azulejão
Gagosian director Louise Neri discusses the evolution of the Azulejão series with Adriana Varejão.
In the Baroque, beauty and the grotesque are always like opposites—it’s an aesthetic that deals with contrasts.
—Adriana Varejão
Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Adriana Varejão.
One of Brazil’s most renowned living artists, Varejão is perhaps best known for her incisive reflections on the rich yet conflicted history and culture of Brazil, embodied in her “azulejão” or “big tile” paintings, ongoing since their first iteration in 1988. These highly inventive paintings simulate azulejos, the ceramic tiles whose complex provenance connects Brazil with Portugal through trade and colonization. The azulejo—a square, glazed terra-cotta tile—is the most widely used form of decoration in Portuguese national art, utilized continuously throughout the country’s history from the Middle Ages onward. Traditionally, vast and luxuriously theatrical designs of azulejos were decorated both religious and secular buildings, homogenizing the architecture into an illusionistic pictorial whole.
Constantly renewing its vigor, the azulejo reflected the organic eclecticism of a culture that was both expansive and open to dialogue. It embraced the lessons of the Moorish artisans, inspired by the ceramics of Seville and Valencia in Spain; it later adapted the ornamental formulae of the Italian Renaissance while acknowledging the exoticism of Oriental china; following an ephemeral period of Dutch inspiration, it created fantasy story panels in blue and white that set the tone for a perfect assimilation of widely varied elements. It was used in far distant places of Portugal’s empire, such as Brazil. Varejão’s constant invocation of the azulejo in her art functions as a metaphor for the mixing of cultures, whether by force or by desire.
Gagosian director Louise Neri discusses the evolution of the Azulejão series with Adriana Varejão.
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.
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.
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
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.
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.
Sydney Stutterheim meditates on the power and possibilities of small-format artworks throughout time.
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.
Lilia Moritz Schwarcz explores themes that are central to the artist’s oeuvre.