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7/4/2013

Adriana Varejao

Malba - Coleccion Costantini, Buenos Aires

Guest curator Adriano Pedrosa

Malba opens the 2013 season with Histórias at the Margins, the first survey exhibition of Adriana Varejão, a leading painter of her generation. Organized by the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo (MAM), the exhibition brings together 40 works, all of them seen here for the first time. The works encompass a number of periods in the artist’s production and include major pieces from the nineties that form part of public and private collections in Brazil and abroad, such as the MAM São Paulo and “la Caixa” Fundación in Madrid.

Adriana Varejão makes use of an array of disciplines (painting, sculpture, drawing and photography) to represent and discuss the expansion and transformation of cultural identity through colonialism, the history of Brazil, folklore, spiritual traditions and gender issues. Her work forms part of the collections of international museums like the Guggenheim in New York, the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Curated by Adriano Pedrosa, the show is organized chronologically, beginning in 1991. However, strict chronological order is sometimes broken to privilege thematic articulation between works in a single room. As this is Varejão’s first survey exhibition, the selection of works chose the best examples within each of the artist’s series—Terra incógnita, Proposal for a Catechesis, Academics, Irezumis, Tongues and Incisions, Jerked-Beef Ruin, Seas and Tiles, Saunas, and Plates. The exhibition will also include the works she presented at the 1994 and 1998 editions of the San Pablo Biennial.

Varejão’s work rescues and intertwines many histories, weaving together multiple narratives and references, from art history to religious art, from ceramic tiles to pottery, from China to Brazil, from colonial iconography to the images produced by European travelers and the art of the19th century academy, from the geometrization of architectural space to geometrical abstraction and the modernist grid, from landscapes and seascapes to maps.

“One element appears as a leitmotif in this hybrid and polyphonic repertoire: the body, be it ripped, cut, quartered, lacerated, in fragments or in pieces. The body is revealed as the skin and flesh of painting, inhabiting the interiors of architecture and unveiled in its ruins; and, finally, represented as saunas through metonymy”, explains the curator.

For Adriana Varejão, “The margin refers to sea, but also what lies outside the center,” thus giving rise to the title of the exhibition. These Histórias at the margins are, in the words of the curator, “marginal histories, often forgotten or set aside by the traditional historiography of Brazil, Portugal or China, or by the historiography of art, the baroque and colonization. These are the histories that Varejão studies, rescues and intertwines in her paintings.”

Catalog
Adriana Varejão. Histórias at the Margins is also the title of the catalogue published by the MAM (Portuguese and English) with an annex of the texts in Spanish translated by Malba. The book includes images of the installations as a whole as well as details of the works, and never-before-published texts by Adriano Pedrosa, specifically: an introduction, a conversation with the artist and individual texts on each of the paintings that, as the curator explains, act as “histories at the margins of the artist’s paintings.”

Adriana Varejão, who was born in Rio de Janeiro, is one of the most widely acclaimed Brazilian artists on the international art scene, with works in the collections of institutions like the Guggenheim Museum (NY), the Tate Modern (London), Fondation Cartier (Paris), Fundación “la Caixa” (Barcelona) and Centro de Arte Contemporânea Inhotim (Brumadinho, MG). She has taken part in close to one hundred exhibitions, including solo shows at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon (2005), the Hara Museum, Tokyo (2007), Fondation Cartier, Paris (2005); and group shows including the biennials of Istanbul (2011), Bucharest (2008), Liverpool (2006), Mercosur (2005), Prague (2003), Johannesburg, South Africa (1995) and San Pablo (1994 and 1998). She participated in the Panorama da Arte Brasilero curated by Gerardo Mosquera and held at MAM in 2003.

Adriano Pedrosa San Pablo-based curator, writer and editor. He was the adjunct curator of the XXIV San Pablo Biennial (1998), co-curator of the XXVII San Pablo Biennial (2006), artistic director of the II Trienal Poli/Gráfica of San Juan (2009), curator of the 31st Panorama da Arte Brasilero at MAM (2009) and co-curator of the XII Istanbul Biennial (2011). Pedrosa has published in Arte y Parte (Santander), Artforum (NY), Art Nexus (Bogota), Art+Text (Sydney), Bomb (NY), Exit (Madrid), Flash Art (Milan), Frieze (London), Lápiz (Madrid), Mousse (Milan), among other journals. He is the author of a number of texts on Varejão.

Organized with the Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo and the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. With the collaboration of the galleries Victoria Miro, London - Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo - Lehmann Maupin, New York

Image: Distancia (Distance), 1996. Colección Instituto Figuereido Ferraz. Foto: Sérgio Guerini.

Press contact:
Guadalupe Requena | María Molteno T +54 (11) 4808 6507/ 6516
grequena@malba.org.ar - mmolteno@malba.org.ar - prensa@malba.org.ar

Opening: Monday April 8, 7pm

Malba – Fundación Costantini
Gallery 5 (2nd floor)
Avenida Figueroa Alcorta 3415 C1425CLA Buenos Aires, Argentina
Hours:
Thursday through Monday and Holidays from 12:00 a 20:00
Wednesday till 21:00
Closed Tuesday
Income up 30' before closing.
Admission:
Adults $32
Teachers and Seniors $16
Students $16.
Children under 5 Free
Wednesday: General $16
Students Free.

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