Adriana Varejão – Frieze Masters

‘Varejão literally puts her finger in the wound of Brazilian post-colonial discourse and viscerally demonstrates just how thin the scab is that has formed around this injury.’ — Anna Schneider

‘To be confronted with Adriana Varejão’s hybrid works of painting and sculpture is to be exposed to extremes: simultaneously abstract and explicit, analytical and irrational, and in their virtuoso play with the nature of surfaces and the interlocking of inner and outer spaces.’

‘Varejão’s themes are deeply rooted in the sensibility of the Baroque, which is characterised by its unsettling tension of contrasts, illusionistic effects and theatrical rhetoric, and which plays a prominent role in the context of Brazil’s cultural history.’

‘Kitchen Tiles with a Variety of Game follows in the genre tradition of butchery paintings, from Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox to Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat, and thus refers not only to the transience of life but also to the similarity of humans and animals in death.’

‘Her multifaceted painting resembles a psychological search into the past with which she uncovers the atrocities of colonialism layer by layer and anchors decolonisation as a continuous process in the bodies of the present.’

‘Varejão sometimes transfers her painting entirely into sculpture and works with the architectural motif of the ruin from which the bodily innards emerge. This enables her to reflect on the connection between the human body, labour, cultural achievement, and its failures.’

‘With her Azulejos series, since 1988, the artist focuses in an increasingly abstract manner on the materiality of surfaces, initially on the blue decorative arabesques, the floral or wave motifs of the original glazes or – in reference to the outstanding ceramics of the Song dynasty in China – exclusively on the craquelure.’

Born in 1964, Adriana Varejão lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Important solo exhibitions include Sutures, Fissures, Ruins, curated by Jochen Volz, Pinacoteca de São Paolo, Brazil (2022); For a Cannibal Rhetoric, curated by Luisa Duarte, Museum of Modern Art, Salvador, travelling to MAMAM, Recife, Brazil (2019); Other Bodies Behind, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico (2019); The French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici (2017); Dallas Contemporary, Texas, USA (2015); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, USA (2014-2015); Histories at the margins, curated by Adriano Pedrosa, MASP – Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo (2012), travelling to MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and MALBA – Museu de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Argentina (2013); Hara Museum, Tokyo, Japan (2007); and Fondation Cartier Pour L’Art Contemporain, Paris, France (2005). The artist’s work has been widely exhibited in group exhibitions throughout Brazil and internationally, recently at institutions including Pera Museum, Istanbul, Turkey (2023); Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2019-2020); and Met Breuer, New York, USA (2019).

A permanent pavilion devoted to Adriana Varejaõ’s work opened in 2008 at Instituto Inhotim in Brazil.