Adriana Varejão

In 1986 she started to work with the medium of oil painting, recreating in thick impasto the ornate Baroque frescoes and religious relics of the eighteenth-century churches in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil.

In 1992, Varejão spent three months traveling in China, where she was able to learn Song dynasty (960–1279 CE) ceramics and classical Chinese landscape painting.

She then began to realize how European narratives were altering pieces of history that were told through art, which signaled the start of a series of subversions of well known imageries disrupted by bloody gashes and fleshy extrusions.

In 1999, she uses a similar approach where her works suggest that familiar spaces are haunted by violent specters through freestanding sculptures that represent in a way the spatial drama of the Baroque.

In 2001, she continues the theme of hidden mysteries with The Saunas and Baths series where tiled interiors painted in intricate monochromatic gradations appear to be psychologically charged.

In these complex labyrinths, light beams from an imperceptible source and traces of the human body appear, in the form of stray hairs or blood.In recent years, Varejão has developed an interest in the culture of pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern Mexico.In September 2017, the exhibition Queermuseu in Porto Alegre, Brazil, featuring works like Adriana Varejão's "Cena de interior II," was prematurely shut down due to conservative backlash with Varejão's piece, depicting the violent colonial history of Brazil, misinterpreted as promoting inappropriate content, leading to protests and accusations against the artist.

Her following engagement with talavera, has catalyzed a new direction in her paintings in which the clean shapes and bright hues of hard-edge abstraction are brought into dialogue with pre-Hispanic artisanal forebears.

Through this intersection of time, culture, and place, Varejão brings light to the parallels between aesthetic systems and raises crucial questions about the life of forms in art.

[19] The piece Proposal for a Catechesis: Part I Diptych: Death and Dismemberment (1993), for example, incorporates azulejos to evoke anthropophagy, a style of cultural cannibalism that was fundamental to the Brazilian modernist movement.

Using these images, Varejão comments on postcolonial Brazilian social structure and implies that colonially influenced order is built upon human destruction and violence.

[26] One of the artist's largest projects to date recently opened at Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Brazil - a specially commissioned pavilion designed in collaboration with architect Rodrigeo Cervino Lopez.

[28] The Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim in Brazil opened in 2008 and includes a pavilion dedicated to her work and built by her then husband, collector Bernardo Paz.