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Adriana Varejão

Interiors

September 14–October 25, 2017
Beverly Hills

Installation view Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation view

Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation view Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation view

Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation view Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation view

Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation view Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation view

Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation view Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation view

Artwork © Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jeff McLane

Installation video Play Button

Installation video

Works Exhibited

Adriana Varejão, Green Song – LA, 2017 Oil and plaster on canvas, 70 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (180 × 180 cm)© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jaime Acioli

Adriana Varejão, Green Song – LA, 2017

Oil and plaster on canvas, 70 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (180 × 180 cm)
© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jaime Acioli

Adriana Varejão, Rose Song – LA, 2017 Oil and plaster on canvas, 70 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (180 × 180 cm)© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jaime Acioli

Adriana Varejão, Rose Song – LA, 2017

Oil and plaster on canvas, 70 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (180 × 180 cm)
© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Jaime Acioli

Adriana Varejão, Monocromo Roma I, 2016 Oil and plaster on canvas, 70 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (180 × 180 cm)© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Vicente de Mello

Adriana Varejão, Monocromo Roma I, 2016

Oil and plaster on canvas, 70 ⅞ × 70 ⅞ inches (180 × 180 cm)
© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Vicente de Mello

Adriana Varejão, Rome Meat Ruin, 2016 Oil on aluminum and polyurethane, 100 ⅞ × 18 ⅛ × 10 ¼ inches (256 × 46 × 26 cm)© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Vicente de Mello

Adriana Varejão, Rome Meat Ruin, 2016

Oil on aluminum and polyurethane, 100 ⅞ × 18 ⅛ × 10 ¼ inches (256 × 46 × 26 cm)
© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Vicente de Mello

Adriana Varejão, A diva, 2004 Oil on canvas, 104 ⅜ × 86 ⅝ inches (265 × 220 cm)© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Vicente de Mello

Adriana Varejão, A diva, 2004

Oil on canvas, 104 ⅜ × 86 ⅝ inches (265 × 220 cm)
© Adriana Varejão. Photo: Vicente de Mello

About

The Baroque always connects two extremes, like light and shadow, in one body, one painting. History outside against a wild body inside, cultured and uncultured, cooked and uncooked, greed and expressionism, rationalism and irrationalism, cold and hot.
—Adriana Varejão

Gagosian is pleased to present Interiors, an exhibition by Adriana Varejão, one of Brazil’s most renowned contemporary artists. A collateral project of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, this is Varejão’s first-ever West Coast exhibition and includes important loans from Brazil and Europe in a selected survey from the last twenty years.

Embodying the fraught pluralism of Brazilian identity and the diverse implications of social, cultural, and aesthetic exchange, Varejão’s unprecedented artistic forms—which encompass painting, sculpture, and video installation—reach across time and place, exposing the multivalent nature of history, memory, and cultural representation.

In Interiors, the spatial drama of the Baroque assumes many forms: from the guise of Minimalism’s cool geometries to the uncertainty that disrupts the seamless logic of the painted surface, to the ruins of Euclidean architecture, thick with flesh, blood, and fat. In the Sauna paintings, Varejão invents chambers tiled in intricately painted monochromatic gradations, recalling the perspectival grids underlying Renaissance masterpieces, as well as the geometries of the modern digital realm. In O iluminado (The Shining) (2009), yellow vibrates across the entire color spectrum, its bright energy underscored by seemingly infinite variations in hue. The abstracted spaces depicted in these paintings are at once familiar and strange, recalling bathhouses, swimming pools, slaughterhouses, and hospitals—places of routine and leisure, life and death. Light beams from an undetectable source; with no visible exits, the environments appear as psychologically charged labyrinths, seductive thresholds for the viewer’s gaze. In the intimately scaled singular painting, The Guest (2004), blood pools on white tiles, a forensic trace of the body and its vulnerability.

Read more

Adriana Varejão: Interiors

Adriana Varejão: Interiors

Lilia Moritz Schwarcz explores themes that are central to the artist’s oeuvre.

Cover of the book Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now: dark blue with orange geometric lettering

Latin American Artists: From 1785 to Now

To celebrate the publication of Phaidon’s new, expansive survey, we share an excerpt from Raphael Fonseca’s introduction and a few of the more than three hundred artists featured.

Image of Adriana Varejão in her studio

Adriana Varejão Selects

To coincide with the release of the first English-language monograph on the career of Adriana Varejão—in which her diverse body of work is explored in depth, from her earliest paintings in the 1990s to her most recent multimedia installations—the artist has curated a selection of films as part of a series copresented by Gagosian and Metrograph in the theater and online. The program features cinema exploring themes of eroticism, excess, and science-fiction fatalism.

Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006), on the cover of Gagosian Quarterly, Summer 2021

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021

The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.

Installation view, Adriana Varejão: Talavera, Gagosian, West 21st Street, New York, May 3–June 26, 2021. Photo: Rob McKeever

Adriana Varejão: For a Poetics of Difference

Curator Luisa Duarte considers the artist’s oeuvre, writing on Varejão’s active engagement with theories of difference, as well as the cultural specters of the past.

Adriana Varejão: In the Studio

Work in Progress
Adriana Varejão: In the Studio

Join Adriana Varejão at her studio in Rio de Janeiro as she prepares for her upcoming exhibition at Gagosian in New York. She speaks about the inspirations for her “tile” paintings, from Portuguese azulejos to the Brazilian Baroque to the Talavera ceramic tradition of Mexico, and reveals for the first time her unique process for creating these works.

News

Photo: Vicente de Mello

Artist Spotlight

Adriana Varejão

February 24–March 2, 2021

Adriana Varejão uses the tactics of the Baroque—simulation, juxtaposition, and parody—to reflect on the mythic pluralism of Brazilian identity and the social, cultural, and aesthetic interactions that produced it. In various mediums, Varejão draws upon a potent visual legacy stemming from the histories of colonialism and transnational exchange to create a confluence of hybridized forms—paintings that are architectural or sculptural, theatrical painted sculptures, mesmerizing multichannel video—which expose the multivalent nature of memory and representation.

Photo: Vicente de Mello

Adriana Varejão: Interiors (New York: Gagosian, 2017)

Online Reading

Adriana Varejão
Interiors

Adriana Varejão: Interiors is available for online reading from February 24 through March 25 as part of Artist Spotlight: Adriana Varejão. Published on the occasion of the artist’s 2017 exhibition Interiors at Gagosian, Beverly Hills, and her 2016–17 exhibition Azulejão at Gagosian, Rome, this catalogue brings together images of the paintings and sculptures presented in these shows, as well as views of her multichannel video installation Transbarroco (2014), shown in both cities at the time of these consecutive exhibitions. The book features a preface by Gagosian director Louise Neri, an essay by scholar Luiz Camillo Osorio, and texts by Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.

Adriana Varejão: Interiors (New York: Gagosian, 2017)