Adriana Varejão

One of the most original and significant voices in contemporary Brazilian art, Adriana Varejão is celebrated internationally as an artist whose work addresses the complex, interweaving themes of history, memory and culture with decolonial narratives.

Since the mid-1990s, Varejão has explored two juxtaposing motifs – flesh and tiles (azulejos) – drawing on the decorative tradition of her native Brazil to examine the confluence of cultures and underlying tensions: between beauty and violence, geometric order and the visceral body. The cracked tile has been a recurring motif in Varejão’s work since early in her career and in visceral monochromatic works, she draws particularly on the history of Portuguese Azulejo tilework and the legacy of Brazil’s colonial past. The artist’s ongoing Meat Ruins works render visible absent bodies implied by her tile works. These fragmentary wall and floor sculptures incorporate sections of trompe-l’oeil tilework that contain masses of material applied and painted to evoke bloodied meat. For Varejão, flesh occupies a symbolic position as a mediator of history, and in its ability to stir both seduction and repulsion. Resembling marble, the veins of fat and flesh in her Ruins make explicit the parallels in Varejão’s art between architecture and the body – these fleshy, architectonic ruins laying bare the vulnerability of bodies, buildings and even entire cultures.     

Speaking about her work, the artist says: ‘My fiction does not belong to any time or place, instead it is characterised by themes dealing with rupture and discontinuity. Everything is contaminated. In my work, the formation of Brazilian culture from the colonial period onwards is used as a metaphor for the modern world.’