Adriana Varejão

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 irrationalism, cold and hot.
—Adriana Varejão

Gagosian is pleased to present Interiors, an exhibition by Adriana Varejão, one of Brazil’s most renowned contemporary artists. A collateral project of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, this is Varejão’s first-ever West Coast exhibition and includes important loans from Brazil and Europe in a selected survey from the last twenty years.

Embodying the fraught pluralism of Brazilian identity and the diverse implications of social, cultural, and aesthetic exchange, Varejão’s unprecedented artistic forms—which encompass painting, sculpture, and video installation—reach across time and place, exposing the multivalent nature of history, memory, and cultural representation.

In Interiors, the spatial drama of the Baroque assumes many forms: from the guise of Minimalism’s cool geometries to the uncertainty that disrupts the seamless logic of the painted surface, to the ruins of Euclidean architecture, thick with flesh, blood, and fat. In the Sauna paintings, Varejão invents chambers tiled in intricately painted monochromatic gradations, recalling the perspectival grids underlying Renaissance masterpieces, as well as the geometries of the modern digital realm. In O iluminado (The Shining) (2009), yellow vibrates across the entire color spectrum, its bright energy underscored by seemingly infinite variations in hue. The abstracted spaces depicted in these paintings are at once familiar and strange, recalling bathhouses, swimming pools, slaughterhouses, and hospitals—places of routine and leisure, life and death. Light beams from an undetectable source; with no visible exits, the environments appear as psychologically charged labyrinths, seductive thresholds for the viewer’s gaze. In the intimately scaled singular painting, The Guest (2004), blood pools on white tiles, a forensic trace of the body and its vulnerability.