Adriana Varejão

(Brazilian, born 1964)

Adriana Varejão is a contemporary Brazilian artist who works in painting, photography, sculpture, and installation. Engaged in her country’s past, Varejão’s work often includes motifs from Baroque-era Spain, Portuguese decorative objects, and the racial identities of Brazil. “My fiction does not belong to any time or place, instead it is characterized by themes dealing with rupture and discontinuity,” she has explained. “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.” Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1964, the artist came into prominence in the late 1990s with her provocative large-scale paintings featuring elements from traditional Portuguese ceramic tiles known as azulejos. Today, Varejão’s works are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museu de Arte do Rio de Janeiro, among others. She continues to live and work in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.