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.