Adriana Varejão: ‘Studio’ at Frieze Masters 2024
The Rio de Janeiro-based artist explores the history and materiality of the azulejo, the ceramic tile used in Portuguese architecture
The Rio de Janeiro-based artist explores the history and materiality of the azulejo, the ceramic tile used in Portuguese architecture
Painting is a body that agonizes yet doesn’t die; it continues to exist, passionately and vigorously. – Adriana Varejão1
Adriana Varejão draws on local cultural traditions, such as the legacy of anthropophagy, to subvert dominant Western visual rhetorics and the Christian narratives they tend to favour.
Since the 1990s, Varejão has expressed a critical view of the European colonization process to which Brazil was subject from the 16th century. Her work digests tropes of baroque iconography – the depiction of wounds, the use of gold, a profusion of ornament – through a filter of parody, reworking it into a raw and visceral form that exposes the violence of colonial conquest. The open sores of Varejão’s paintings and sculptures represent at once the undoing of Eurocentric versions of history and the rediscovery of local knowledge forms. In addition to the baroque, Varejão draws on a wide spectrum of cultural and historical references, including Chinese Song Dynasty ceramics and paintings, Japanese irezumi (tattoos), and early Portuguese maps.
In her most recent body of work, Varejão revisits a leitmotif of her practice: Portuguese azulejos (tiles) that adjoin Chinese, Dutch-Flemish and Moorish ceramic traditions through cultural miscegenation.
Adriana Varejão is showing with Victoria Miro at Frieze Masters 2024.
About Studio at Frieze Masters 2024
Following its debut in 2023, Studio, curated by Sheena Wagstaff, highlights Frieze Masters’ commitment to living practice in dialogue with historical art. By focusing on artists’ place of making, it reflects the idea of the past informing the present moment of creation in an object for the future.
Studio features ten solo presentations by Beatrice Caracciolo (Paula Cooper Gallery), Isabella Ducrot (Sadie Coles HQ, Galerie Gisela Capitain and Standard (Oslo)), Nathalie Du Pasquier (Pace Gallery), Shirazeh Houshiary (Lisson Gallery), Kim Yun Shin (Lehmann Maupin), Mernet Larsen (James Cohan), Thaddeus Mosley (Karma), Doris Salcedo (White Cube), Nilima Sheikh (Chemould Prescott Road) and Adriana Varejão (Victoria Miro).
Further Information
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, 9 – 13 October 2024, The Regent’s Park.
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Film footage credit: Adriana Varejão: Between Flesh and Oceans, 2023. Directed by Andrucha Waddington and Pedro Buarque de Holland
1 Quotation from Desiree Mitton, ‘Adriana and the Mestizo Mind’, Whitewall, 27 September 2017.
