Adriana Varejão, born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, has created a body of work central to Brazilian contemporary art. She critically appropriates traditional languages and reinterprets historical narratives of Brazil and Latin America.
Since the 1990s, Varejão has explored painting and installation as investigative fields. She uses them to reexamine the colonial past, colonization’s violence, and the persistence of cultural marks through a contemporary lens.
Portuguese tiles in the art of Adriana Varejão
A central aspect of Varejão’s work lies in her incorporation of visual references from the Luso-Brazilian tradition. She frequently draws on Portuguese tiles, with their ornamental patterns and prominent role in colonial architecture. Varejão does not treat them as mere decoration; instead, she deconstructs, fragments, and subverts them, creating surfaces that reveal ruptures and fissures.
Oil and polyurethane on canvas, 100 × 120 cm
Private collection
In this process, the tile becomes a critical element: she challenges its formal integrity to expose the contradictions of history and culture.
Dialogue with traveling artists
Another fundamental point is the dialogue with traveling artists from the 18th and 19th centuries. Adriana Varejão employs collages, inserts fragments of drawings and paintings that recorded Brazilian landscapes and peoples, and re-presents them as part of contemporary compositions. These historical elements are no longer treated as objective documents but as material for critical analysis. By recontextualizing such images, the artist highlights both their function as colonial records and the possibility of reinterpreting them in light of current debates on identity and representation.
Adriana Varejão’s work is deeply rooted in the Brazilian context. It does not shy away from local specificities but incorporates them as the core of her production. Varejão engages with symbols of colonial architecture, traveler iconography, and the concept of mestizaje
She reflects on Brazil’s history beyond a strictly national perspective. This approach extends to Latin America.
Her work participates in a continental dialogue on colonization, identity formation, and enduring inequalities.
International recognition of Adriana Varejão
Adriana Varejão’s work receives international acclaim, highlighting her relevance in the global art circuit. Since the 1990s, she has participated in exhibitions at institutions such as Tate Modern in London and MoMA in New York, while maintaining a strong presence in Brazil through retrospectives and major shows. This circulation illustrates how she combines local specificity with international reach.
Adriana Varejão treats her work as an exercise in expanded temporality. She mobilizes the past by recovering and questioning colonial references, engages the present by placing them into contemporary debates on identity and memory, and shapes the future by using art as a space for critical re-elaboration and the creation of new narratives.
In this sense, her work not only occupies a central place in Brazilian contemporary art but also contributes decisively to international debates on coloniality, representation, and history.
