Adriana Varejão was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1964 and she still lives and works there. Her paintings, sculptures, installations, and photographs engage with the complex and violent artistic and political history of Brazil. Her work is about the transformation of the cultural identity, she tries to explore and analyze the past in order to understand the present. She researches this theme within the contexts of race, body, identity, and the effects of colonialism. Through the pain and pleasure in the history of her country, in connection with art history and architecture, she finds her inspiration for the creation of appealing and thought-provoking art. She started working as an artist after attending free courses at the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro, it was there that she came in contact with the "80 Generation", a group of artists who retook the painting. In 1985, she produced the series Prehistoric through which she received the Acquisition Award at the IX National Salon of Plastic Arts at Funarte in 1987, thus it she was inserted in the national art scene.

 

In her early series Baroque (1987–1992), Varejão explores the ornate style that arrived with the conquistadors. In the series Terra Incognita (1991–2003), she utilized the Dutch, Portuguese, and Chinese pictorial traditions imported in the seventeenth century. With her series Proposal for a Catechesis (1993–99), Varejão began to incorporate the decorative terracotta tiles, or azulejos, which served as a visual manifestation of the Portuguese presence in Brazil beginning in the eighteenth century. Varejão's paintings became increasingly sculptural, introducing elements that extended beyond the canvas, and she soon transitioned to sculpture and installation. By the time the artist initiated the series Jerked-beef Ruins (2000–04), the decorative, distinctly European tiles gave way to more universal pale blue or white tiles found in public buildings or bathrooms. In these sculptures, the cadaverous contents do not burst from the center as they had in her earlier pieces, but rather lurk hidden within, exposed only at the edges of the smooth facade.

 

In Varejão's recent series of paintings entitled Saunas and Baths (2001–08), an eerie silence and stillness pervades scenes of empty corridors, pools, and stairs composed entirely of tiles. By virtue of tensions around race and ethnicity in Brazil, Varejão started to explore this vital problem racism in the 21 century. In her portrait series Polvo (2014) – Portuguese for ‘octopus’, she combines colour theory and casta, to examine the norm of determining the race in terms of skin colour. It is a combination of paint tines, with each shade documented in colour bars and wheels on the edge of the canvases. The referring to the ‘octopus’ means its ability to change colour for the purposes of camouflage and survival. In 1976 Brazilian census asking citizens to define the colour of their skin. Varejão uses terms from that census – such as “milky coffee” or “sun kissed” – as a jumping-off point for her palette. Through these artworks she tries to show the existence inequality among Brazilians: “There is this propaganda that we are this racial democracy. And in fact I don't think we are.”

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One of the largest collection of Varegão’s artworks are at Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Brazil. Her works also included in numerous collections worldwide, some of them are Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. Varejão is represented by the Lehmann Maupin Gallery in New York City, NY and Victoria Miro Gallery in London, UK. She holds the auction record for a Brazilian artist with a $1.8 million sale of Wall With Incisions a la Fontana (from the Tongues and Incisions serios) at Christie's in February 2011.

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Solo exhibitions of Varejão's work have been organized by Instituto de Arte Contemporãnea in Lisbon (1998), Borås Konstmuseum in Switzerland (2000), Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris (2005), and Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo (2007). Her work has also been included in major exhibitions like São Paulo Bienal (1994 and 1998), Venice Biennale (1995), Liverpool Biennial (1999 and 2006), Brazil: Body and Soul at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2001), SITE Santa Fe (2004), Retratos: 2,000 Years of Latin American Portraits at the San Diego Museum of Art (2005), and Global Feminisms at the Brooklyn Museum (2007). In 2004 Varejão was an artist-in-residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.