The Pinacoteca de São Paulo, a museum of the Ministry of Culture and Creative Industries of the State of São Paulo, presents until August 01, 2022, the Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão with her latest exhibition: Sutures, Fissures, Ruínas.

A milestone in Brazil

The exhibition is the most comprehensive ever organized on Varejão's work, bringing together for the first time a significant group of more than 60 works from 1985 to 2022. Adriana Varejão can be described, without exaggeration, as one of the most expressive Brazilian artists of the present day.

Her works are characterized by an evolutionary, repetitive and radical exploration of Brazil's visual history, European traditions and the conventions and material codes of European art production and their influence and interpretation in Brazil's local mixed cultures, in the timeline of her works.

Evolution, History, Disruption

Early on, Adriana Varejão experimented with evolutionary, as well as disruptive, reinterpretations of Baroque paintings. For example, the surface of the canvas is never just a paint support, but an essential element of the painting's message. The artist is not afraid of cuts, cracks, rough carvings as well as dark crevices as recurring elements. Thus, they also always symbolize the bridge and wounds in the short but very diverse history of Brazil.

The exhibition highlights these features in their meaningful meanings and spans seven rooms of the Pinacoteca.

Five works from this series are presented in the Octagon, the central room of the Pinacoteca. Two works not previously shown were produced specifically for this exhibition: Moedor (2021) and Ruina 22 (2022).  A third highlight of this series is Ruína Brasilis (2021), which the artist generously donated to the collection of the Pinacoteca de São Paulo and which was featured in her last exhibition in New York last year.

Cloister of the Convento de São Francisco.

Despite Brazil's historically unique and profound interpretation, it is important to understand that many of the works included in this exhibition have had little or almost no exposure in Brazil. In most cases, the works went to international markets immediately after their completion and were thus dispersed internationally. This is also the case with Azulejos from 1988.

In this first work, Varejão interprets the Portuguese tile panel from the cloister of the Convento de São Francisco in Salvador de Bahia. The version painted on canvas, which belongs to a European collection, precedes his famous "azulejos", which became a leitmotif for many other works as a support, geometry or pictorial object. In view of the importance of this evolutionary work, taking into account its process of creation, a separate exhibition space is dedicated to this work.

Much more than a painter

The works of Adriana Varejão go beyond painting. They are already sculptures at the same time, since the works go beyond the two-dimensionality of the canvas.

Additional elements are integrated, completely different materials are added, broken up, cuts are made, "mutilations" are made, thus revealing a situation that creates a new meaning.

Adriana Varejão in Inhotim

One can visit Adriana Varejão's own pavilion at the Center for Contemporary Art Inhotim. The Center for Contemporary Art Inhotim (also: Instituto Inhotim) is an institution with a collection of contemporary art. It is located in Brumadinho, in the state of Minas Gerais, a city with about 40,000 inhabitants and 60 km from the capital Belo Horizonte.

It opened in 2004 to house the collection of entrepreneur Bernardo Paz. Today it exhibits works created from 1970 to the present. The central exhibition building was designed by Brazilian architect Rodrigo Cerviño Lopez. The collection consists of 450 works by Brazilian and foreign artists with emphasis on works by Cildo Meireles, Vik Muniz, Hélio Oiticica, Paul McCarthy and Zhang Huan. The exhibition is embedded in a spacious garden area, the design of which incorporated suggestions from Roberto Burle Marx, among others. In the outdoor area, surrounded by native forest, two sculptures by the artist Adriana Varejão will be exhibited, as well as the mahogany boat by the British artist Simon Starling. Thematic tours and instructive visits for school groups are offered. The garden and park area covers approximately 300,000 square meters. Those wishing to visit this exhibition should plan on at least two full days.

Pinacoteca, State of São Paulo, Brazil

The Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo is one of the most important art museums in the city of São Paulo in Brazil. The painting gallery is located next to the Estação da Luz, the city's central train station, in a large brick building designed by Ramos de Azevedo, the city's important architect. The building was inaugurated in 1905 and was originally intended to serve as the headquarters of the "Liceu de Artes e Oficios". In 1911 it was already transformed by decree into a museum.

Since the reconstruction in the 1990s, led by Paulo Mendes da Rocha, in which a mixture of old building fabric and modern architectural elements turned the building into one of the most impressive museums ever, this institution has become one of the most dynamic art venues in Brazil.

An annex to the Pinacoteca is the Estação Pinacoteca on the other side of the Estação da Luz; this building is available for exhibitions and houses the Pinacoteca Documentation Center. This was the seat of the Departamento de Ordem Política e Social during the military dictatorship.

The exhibition Adriana Varejão - Sutura - Fissura - Ruínas can be visited at the Pinacoteca Luz, São Paulo, Brazil, until August 01, 2022.