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.’

About the Artist

?Born in 1964, Adriana Varejão currently lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In 2025, the solo exhibition Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come From the Tropics opened at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York, closely followed by the opening of Adriana Varejão and Paula Rego: Between Your Teeth at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, an exhibition that highlights the points of intersection between both artists through a combined presentation of more than 100 works. In 2022, Adriana Varejão: Sutures, Fissures, Ruins–among the most comprehensive exhibitions of the artist’s work to date, featuring more than 60 works from 1985 to 2022–was on view at Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil.

Other important solo exhibitions include Adriana Varejão: Por uma retórica canibal, curated by Luisa Duarte, Museum of Modern Art, Salvador, travelling to MAMAM, Recife (2019); the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, Rome (2017); Dallas Contemporary, Texas (2015); The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2014–15); Histórias às margens (Histories at the margins), Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (2012), which toured to Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, and MALBA - Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (2013); Hara Museum, Tokyo (2007); Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain, Paris (2005); and Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (2005) amongst others.

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