The monographic exhibition Other Bodies Behind. Adriana Varejao, organized by the Tamayo Museum, it explores the lines of research that Adriana Varejão (Rio de Janeiro, 1964) has developed in her artistic practice over the past thirty years.
The exhibition is structured around three different bodies of work: figurative canvases from the XNUMXs, a selection from the Ruínas de carne seca (Jerked-Beef Ruins) series, and the latest version of his installation painting Polvo (Octopus), showing through them the changes, tensions and continuities that his work has undergone during different periods of his creative activity.
The exhibition focuses, on the one hand, on the different treatments of Varejão's painting, which are connected to his considerations of the pictorial medium as artifice and (political) representation. On the other, it showcases one of the main aspects of his research: the body in its historical, political and aesthetic contexts. Through both aspects, always present in each of his works, Varejão carefully examines the consequences that the colonial period of Brazil has on the current configuration of its society, as well as on the history of image production.
A recurring strategy in his practice is to take up images derived from the figurative traditions of the European Baroque and its counterparts in Latin America – representations of the continent from a Eurocentric perspective, as well as portraiture and painted tiles – reappropriating them to develop the research topics above.
His pieces make it clear that they are a dummy copy, a non-laughable parody that takes the theatricality of the Baroque one step further, constantly underlining their status as replica and trompe l'oeil. For Adriana Varejão, historical images bring with them power relations, which she seeks to subvert through an exercise of decolonization of the image.
