Work by Adriana Varejão that is on display. PHOTO: Disclosure

With around 25 works that are very representative of her career spanning more than 30 years, the Rio de Janeiro artist Adriana Varejão presents at the Aloisio Magalhães Museum of Modern Art (MAMAM), in Recife, the exhibition For a Cannibal Rhetoric. After visiting Salvador, the exhibition curated by Luisa Duarte arrives in the capital of Pernambuco with the addition of some works, all produced between 1992 and 2016.

Varejão's production, largely centered on a historical review of colonialism, revealing its violence and atrocities, gains special strength when it is exhibited in Recife, as the artist herself claims. “Since the 1980s, when I started painting and researching the Baroque, I took several churches in Recife as a reference. Some images have always remained within me and I carry them to this day, such as the altar of the Basilica of Nossa Senhora do Carmo, the tiles of the Convent of Santo Antônio, or even the ceiling of the Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição dos Militares. All this repertoire helped me shape my language. These and other examples reiterate my emotion to be holding this first solo show in Recife, so close to some important references.”

With torn tiles that expose viscera, flesh, organs and blood in their entrails, the artist brings to light hidden stories, little visited by official history. According to the curatorial text: “The selection of works also reveals the network of influences that crosses the artist’s work: from the Baroque to China, from tiles to the iconography of colonization, from art to religious history, from the body to ceramics, from maps to tattoo, vast is the world that feeds the poetics of Adriana Varejão”.

As in Salvador, it is the first time that Recife receives a significant number of works by the artist, who has already exhibited in several cities around the world and has works in institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, the Fondation Cartier in Paris, the Inhotim center in Brumadinho, the MAM in São Paulo, the MAR in Rio de Janeiro and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among others. The exhibition will be on display until June 15th and will continue to other cities outside the Rio-São Paulo axis.

Adriana Varejão – For a Cannibal Rhetoric
BREAST - Rua da Aurora, 265, Recife
From June 29 to September 8, 2019
Free


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