Adriana Varejao

Adriana Varejão was born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, where she continues to live and work. She trained at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro between 1983 and 1985, and has since developed a practice that engages deeply with colonial history, bodily imagery, and the fractured visual legacies of Brazil's past. Working across painting and large-scale installation, she draws on the iconography of azulejo tilework, anatomical imagery, and historical portraiture to construct works that are simultaneously seductive and unsettling — surfaces that appear to crack, bleed, or rupture from within.

Varejão's international exhibition history spans several decades and major institutions. A solo presentation at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris in 2005, Chambre d'échos, brought her work to wide European attention, and a residency at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 2004 deepened her engagement with North American audiences. Solo exhibitions have followed at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Victoria Miro in London (Polvo, 2013), Gagosian in New York (Talavera, 2021), the Pinacoteca de São Paulo (Suturas, fissuras, ruínas, 2022), and Gagosian in Athens (Histórias Moldadas, 2025). Her work entered permanent institutional collections including the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and Instituto Inhotim in Brumadinho opened a dedicated Galeria Adriana Varejão in 2008. Among her most significant works is Carnívoras (2012), a monumental polyptych of 54 panels created for the exhibition Histórias às Margens at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, which demonstrated the expansive, environmental scale her practice can achieve. An earlier painting, Milagre dos Peixes (1991), has been cited as a formative example of her engagement with colonial memory and the transformation of inherited visual narratives.

Her contributions to contemporary art have been recognized with a series of distinguished honors: the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture in 2008, Brazil's Order of Cultural Merit in 2011, the Grande Prêmio da Crítica in the visual-arts category from the Associação Paulista de Críticos de Arte in 2012, and the Prêmio Mario Pedrosa — Artista de Linguagem Contemporânea from the Associação Brasileira de Críticos de Arte in 2013. Varejão is currently represented by Gagosian, Victoria Miro, and Lehmann Maupin. Looking ahead, she is announced as Brazil's representative at the Biennale Arte 2026 in Venice, with concurrent solo presentations at Victoria Miro in Venice (Modernisms, September–October 2026) and at Fondation Cartier's Galerie Valois in Paris (June–October 2026).