Adriana Varejão

She began her career exploring vestiges of colonisation and slavery, melding the Western iconography of the 16th and 17th centuries with the traditions of Portuguese azulejos (painted tiles), and Chinese ceramics. Her work explores the violence of these cultural clashes and power dynamics through representations of indigenous body and flesh. Her artistic language, described as “contemporary baroque”, illuminates the boundaries and tensions between beauty and brutality, memory and representation. Varejão has earned international recognition and has participated in the Biennales in Venice, São Paulo and Sydney. Her work has been the focus of several solo exhibitions, notably Sutures, Fissures, Ruins at the Pinacothèque of São Paulo in 2022, as well as being featured in several major group exhibitions throughout the world.

The first showing of Varejão's work at the Fondation Cartier was in 2003, in the exhibition Yanomami, Esprits de la Forêt. In 2005, she had a solo exhibition, Chambre d’Échos. Since then, several shows at the foundation have featured her works, notably Les Visitants in Buenos Aires in 2017, Nous les Arbres in 2019 and Siamo Foresta in 2023. In Siamo Foresta, her paintings and her work on paper Cadernos de Viagem: Yakoana (2003), in which she depicts a psychotropic plant in the style of traditional Western botanical drawing, were presented alongside the shamanic drawings of Joseca Yanomami. This juxtaposition echoes the 2003 encounter between Varejão and the Yanomami, initiated by the Fondation Cartier.