Adriana Varejão (born 1964,
Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro, or simply Rio, is the capital of the Rio de Janeiro (state), state of Rio de Janeiro. It is the List of cities in Brazil by population, second-most-populous city in Brazil (after São Paulo) and the Largest cities in the America ...
) is a Brazilian artist. She works in various disciplines including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation and photography. She was an artist-in-resident at the
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is an art museum in Boston, Massachusetts, which houses significant examples of European, Asian, and American art. Its collection includes paintings, sculpture, tapestries, and decorative arts. It was found ...
in 2004. Varejão lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.
Background
In the 1980s, Varejão was an engineering student. However, it was thanks to a bohemian artist Elizabeth Taylor's performance in
The Sandpiper
''The Sandpiper'' is a 1965 American drama film directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the third of eleven films starring the power couple.
Plot
Laura Reynolds is a free-spirited, unwed single mother liv ...
(1965) that she decided to also pursue a career in art. She then quit university and achieved global recognition as a well established contemporary artist. Varejão appropriates stylistic traditions that were introduced to Brazil upon colonial encounter. Since Brazil is one of the most ethnically diverse countries in the world, it has undoubtedly informed her style as an artist. Over the course of her 30-year career, Varejão has created a number of series which represent the identity, culture and race, and by implication, also the construction of her own identity. Her work is now included in numerous collections worldwide, some of which are the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, among others. In her January 2016 interview with Ocula Magazine, the discussion about art as a way of being in the world is brought up, she says, 'It's a collective way of seeing the world, not individual. It's a point of view that's inserted within a culture. It's sociological.'
Varejão attended the
Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage
The School of Visual Arts (Escola de Artes Visuais d Parque Lage - EAV) is a school for artists, curators, researchers and others in Rio de Janeiro. It is located within the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden.
History
Created by Rubens Gerchman in ...
from 1983 to 1985. In 1986 she started to work with the medium of oil painting, recreating 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 was able to learn
Song dynasty
The Song dynasty ( ) was an Dynasties of China, imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 960 to 1279. The dynasty was founded by Emperor Taizu of Song, who usurped the throne of the Later Zhou dynasty and went on to conquer the rest of the Fiv ...
(960–1279 CE) ceramics and classical Chinese landscape painting. She then began to realize how European narratives were altering pieces of history that were told through art, which signaled the start of a series of subversions of well known imageries disrupted by bloody gashes and fleshy extrusions. Her work from this period demonstrates the violence and eroticism of Brazilian history in relation to ''
antropofagia'', a key concept in Brazilian modernism that reclaims the rituals of the Tupi people, transforming the taboo of cannibalism into a symbolic totem of cultural absorption in postcolonial Brazil.
In 1999, she uses a similar approach where her works suggest that familiar spaces are haunted by violent specters through freestanding sculptures that represent in a way the spatial drama of the Baroque. In 2001, she continues the theme of hidden mysteries with The ''Saunas and Baths'' series where tiled interiors painted in intricate monochromatic gradations appear to be psychologically charged. In these complex labyrinths, light beams from an imperceptible source and traces of the human body appear, in the form of stray hairs or blood.In recent years, Varejão has developed an interest in the culture of pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern Mexico.In September 2017, the exhibition ''Queermuseu'' in Porto Alegre, Brazil, featuring works like Adriana Varejão's "Cena de interior II," was prematurely shut down due to conservative backlash with Varejão's piece, depicting the violent colonial history of Brazil, misinterpreted as promoting inappropriate content, leading to protests and accusations against the artist. In January 2017, she visited the Museo Amparo in Puebla to study local ''talavera'' and ''cholula'' polychrome pottery. Her following engagement with ''talavera'', has catalyzed a new direction in her paintings in which the clean shapes and bright hues of hard-edge abstraction are brought into dialogue with pre-Hispanic artisanal forebears. Through this intersection of time, culture, and place, Varejão brings light to the parallels between aesthetic systems and raises crucial questions about the life of forms in art.
The artist however, only became popular in the late 1990s with her provocative paintings involving elements from traditional Portuguese ceramic tiles,
azulejo
(, ; from the Arabic ) is a form of Portuguese and Spanish painted Tin-glazing, tin-glazed ceramic tilework. ''Azulejos'' are found on the interior and exterior of church (building), churches, palaces, ordinary houses, schools, and nowadays, r ...
s. Her tile work demonstrates coldly beautiful spa settings that invoke the feel of cracks beneath the beautiful surface. She utilizes color and shadow to create hints of hidden mysteries in her pieces, and this is especially common in multiple of her 2004 tile creations. The mystery also tends to be caused by the discord between the titles of her works—A Diva (The Diva), O Sedutor (The Seducer), O Obsceno (The Obscene), and O Obsessivo (The Obsessive) — and the minimalist styles that she used for those art pieces. Varejao's work could be found in the Brazil - Body & Soul exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, in solo exhibits in museums internationally, including the Victoria Miro Gallery in London, the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the Soledad Lorenzo in Madrid. As of now, several museums feature her work in their long-term and permanent collections, including the Tate Museum in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. In 2008, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo Inhotim in Brazil created a permanent pavilion to display Varejao's artwork.
Influences
References to the effects of colonialism of Brazil by Europe, are apparent in her work as well as
art history
Art history is the study of Work of art, artistic works made throughout human history. Among other topics, it studies art’s formal qualities, its impact on societies and cultures, and how artistic styles have changed throughout history.
Tradit ...
and illusion. Her work alludes to expansion and transformation of cultural identity, yet continues the use of her theme of understanding the past, in order to understand the present. Her artistic style of layering paint evokes a metaphorical retelling and reimagination of Brazil's history in relation to Portugal and Europe.
Cultural anthropophagy, or the process of absorbing and incorporating foreign influence into native Brazilian culture, inspires much of Varejão's work. This movement is evident throughout Brazil's history into the present and the dichotomy of diversity and unity is a common theme amongst contemporary Brazilian artists. In Varejão's works, she examines this theme within the contexts of race, body, identity, and the effects of
colonialism
Colonialism is the control of another territory, natural resources and people by a foreign group. Colonizers control the political and tribal power of the colonised territory. While frequently an Imperialism, imperialist project, colonialism c ...
.
Media
Drawing upon tensions surrounding
race and ethnicity in Brazil
Brazilian society is made up of a confluence of people of Indigenous, Portuguese, and African descent. Other major significant groups include Italians, Spaniards, Germans, Lebanese, and Japanese.
Latin Europe accounted for four-fifths of ...
, Varejão uses installation, oil painting, and drawing to comment on the perception of race in Brazil in the twenty-first century. She often starts with a canvas, adding materials such as porcelain and ceramics. In her work entitled ''Polvo,'' exhibited at Lehman Maupin in 2014, Varejão combines
color theory
Color theory, or more specifically traditional color theory, is a historical body of knowledge describing the behavior of colors, namely in color mixing, color contrast effects, color harmony, color schemes and color symbolism. Modern color th ...
and
casta
() is a term which means "Lineage (anthropology), lineage" in Spanish and Portuguese and has historically been used as a racial and social identifier. In the context of the Spanish America, Spanish Empire in the Americas, the term also refer ...
(a social theory that influenced European paintings of Brazil's conquest), to examine the norm of defining race in terms of skin color. The series of nearly identical self-portraits forming the bulk of the work were displayed with individualized titles that explained the portraits’ only differences: the titles were generated by the 1976 Brazilian census, which asked Brazilians for the first time to give their definitions of their own skin tone; the responses ranged from branquinha, “snow-white,” to morenão, roughly “big black dude.” Varejão provided the entranceway mural ''Cores Polvo'' in 2019 as a piece commissioned by Sesc Guarulhos, which dialogues with the 1976 Brazilian census on race and identity.
Many of Varejão's works appropriate the use of
azulejo
(, ; from the Arabic ) is a form of Portuguese and Spanish painted Tin-glazing, tin-glazed ceramic tilework. ''Azulejos'' are found on the interior and exterior of church (building), churches, palaces, ordinary houses, schools, and nowadays, r ...
s, traditional Portuguese blue tiles, and maps to comment on colonial legacies in Brazil. Employment of azulejos in Brazilian art is both transcultural and transmedial, directly linking Portugal's historical colonial influence to aspects of contemporary Brazilian society. The piece ''Proposal for a Catechesis: Part I Diptych: Death and Dismemberment'' (1993), for example, incorporates azulejos to evoke
anthropophagy
Anthropophagy may refer to:
* Human cannibalism, the act or practice of humans eating the flesh or internal organs of other human beings
** Androphagi, an ancient Scythian tribe whose existence was recorded by ancient Greco-Roman authors
** Anthr ...
, a style of cultural cannibalism that was fundamental to the Brazilian modernist movement. Explicit references to artistic takes on anthropophagy are depicted in the series Tongues and Incisions (1997-2003) and Jerked Beef Ruins (2000-2004), among others, which draw attention to the tongue as a symbol for taste (cannibalism) and site of speech to critique colonial history. Varejão's use of skin-tone color pallettes and visceral textured painting techniques evokes the body and the mark of historical violence on it even when no body is explicitly portrayed.
Works
Selected works
Several of Varejão's sculptural installations, including “Linda da Lapa”, “Folds”, and “Ruina de Charque - Nova Capela (Nova Capela Jerked-Beef Ruin),” juxtapose structural uniformity and stability against human destruction. These artworks consist of bisected
azulejos
(, ; from the Arabic ) is a form of Portuguese and Spanish painted tin-glazed ceramic tilework. ''Azulejos'' are found on the interior and exterior of churches, palaces, ordinary houses, schools, and nowadays, restaurants, bars and even railwa ...
-covered walls filled with human organs. Using these images, Varejão comments on
postcolonial
Postcolonialism (also post-colonial theory) is the critical academic study of the cultural, political and economic consequences of colonialism and imperialism, focusing on the impact of human control and extractivism, exploitation of colonized pe ...
Brazilian social structure and implies that colonially influenced order is built upon human destruction and violence.
Varejão created art that was on the exterior of the
Olympic Aquatics Stadium
The Olympic Aquatics Stadium () was a temporary aquatics center in the Barra Olympic Park in Rio de Janeiro. The venue hosted the Swimming at the 2016 Summer Olympics, swimming events, Synchronized swimming at the 2016 Summer Olympics, Synchro ...
, a temporary structure in which the swimming events of the
2016 Summer Olympics
The 2016 Summer Olympics (), officially the Games of the XXXI Olympiad () and officially branded as Rio 2016, were an international multi-sport event held from 5 to 21 August 2016 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with preliminary events i ...
were held.
Collections
One of the artist's largest projects to date recently opened at
Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Brazil - a specially commissioned pavilion designed in collaboration with architect Rodrigeo Cervino Lopez. Her work is included in numerous collections worldwide, some of which are the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, often referred to as The Guggenheim, is an art museum at 1071 Fifth Avenue between 88th and 89th Street (Manhattan), 89th Streets on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. It hosts a permanent coll ...
in New York, the
Tate Modern
Tate Modern is an art gallery in London, housing the United Kingdom's national collection of international Modern art, modern and contemporary art (created from or after 1900). It forms part of the Tate group together with Tate Britain, Tate Live ...
in London, and the
Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is an art museum in La Jolla
La Jolla ( , ) is a hilly, seaside neighborhood in San Diego, California, occupying of curving coastline along the Pacific Ocean. The population reported in the ...
, among others.
Art market
Varejão is represented by the
Gagosian Gallery
The Gagosian Gallery is a modern and contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most well-known artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. As of 2024, Gagosian employs 300 people at 19 exhibiti ...
in the US, the
Victoria Miro Gallery
The Victoria Miro Gallery is a British contemporary art gallery in London, run by Victoria Miro. Miro opened her first gallery in 1985 in Cork Street, before moving to larger premises in Islington in 2000 and later opening a second space in St ...
in the UK, and the Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in Brazil. She holds the auction record for a Brazilian artist with a $1.8 million sale of ''Wall With Incisions a la Fontana'' at
Christie's
Christie's is a British auction house founded in 1766 by James Christie (auctioneer), James Christie. Its main premises are on King Street, St James's in London, and it has additional salerooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong, Milan, Geneva, Shan ...
in February 2011.
Exhibits
The
Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim in Brazil opened in 2008 and includes a pavilion dedicated to her work and built by her then husband, collector Bernardo Paz. She was included in the
Brazil: Body and Soul exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2001, as well as in the MoMA QNS exhibition
Tempo, where she filled an entire room with the wall-based installation Azulejões (Big Blue Tiles). Her work has also been included in the Venice Biennale and
Biennale of Sydney
The Biennale of Sydney is an international festival of contemporary art, held every two years in Sydney, Australia. It is a large and well-attended contemporary visual arts event in the country. Alongside the Venice and São Paulo biennales and ...
. She had solo exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin (2011 forthcoming, 2009, 2003, 1999) in New York, Soledad Lorenzo (2011 forthcoming, 2002, 1998) in Madrid,
Victoria Miro Gallery
The Victoria Miro Gallery is a British contemporary art gallery in London, run by Victoria Miro. Miro opened her first gallery in 1985 in Cork Street, before moving to larger premises in Islington in 2000 and later opening a second space in St ...
(2011 forthcoming, 2002) in London, Galeria Fortes Vilaca (2009, 2005) in São Paulo, th
Hara Museum of Contemporary Art(2007) in Tokyo and th
Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain(2005) in Paris.
Awards
* 2008, Chevalier des Arts et Lettres Medal,
French Ministry of Culture
The Ministry of Culture () is the ministry (government department), ministry of the Government of France in charge of List of museums in France, national museums and the . Its goal is to maintain the French identity through the promotion and pro ...
* 2011, The Order of Cultural Merit, Cultural Ministry of Brazil
* 2012, Grande Prêmio da Crítica, Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte
* 2013, Mario Pedrosa Award,
Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte
References
External links
Gagosian GalleryVictoria Miro GalleryFortes D’Aloia & Gabriel GalleryAdriana VarejaoMuseum of Modern ArtMetropolitan Museum of ArtInhotim Instituto Cultural*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Varejao, Adriana
1964 births
Living people
20th-century Brazilian women artists
21st-century Brazilian women artists
21st-century Brazilian artists
Artists from Rio de Janeiro (city)
Brazilian contemporary artists