Adriana Varejao

Influences

References to the effects of colonialism of Brazil by Europe, are apparent in her work as well as art history 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.

Cultural anthropology, 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.

Media

Drawing upon tensions surrounding race and ethnicity in Brazil, 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 cavas, adding materials such as porcelain and ceramics. In her work entitled “Polvo,” exhibited at Lehman Maupin in 2014, Varejão combines color theory and casta (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.”

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-covered walls filled with human organs. Using these images, Varejão comments on postcolonial 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, a temporary structure in which the swimming events of the 2016 Summer Olympics 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 in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, among others.

Art market

Varejão is represented by the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York City, NY and Victoria Miro Gallery in London, UK. 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 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. 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 (2011 forthcoming, 2002) in London, Galeria Fortes Vilaca (2009, 2005) in São Paulo, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art (2007) in Tokyo and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (2005) in Paris.

List of works

Paintings by series

Drawings

Photographs

Special Projects