The monographic exhibition Other Bodies Behind. Adriana Varejão, organized by the Museo Tamayo, explores the lines of research that Adriana Varejão (Rio de Janeiro, 1964) has developed in her artistic practice since the 90's, and brings together pieces created over three decades. It is structured according to three different bodies of work—figurative paintings from the 90's, a selection from the series Jerked Beef Ruins, as well as the latest iteration of Polvo—, showing through them the changes, tensions and continuities that her oeuvre has undergone during diverse periods of her creative activity.
A multidisciplinary artist, painting has been at the very center of her practice, in the beginning employing traditional surfaces such as canvas or wood, and gradually extending her pictorial resolutions to the exhibition space. This exhibition focuses, on the one hand, on Varejão’s diverse treatments of painting, which are linked to her considerations of the pictorial medium as artifice and (political) representation. On the other, it puts on view one of the principal aspects of her investigations: the body in its historic, political and aesthetic contexts. Through both aspects, always present in each of her artworks, Varejão scrutinizes the consequences that the colonial period of Brazil has in the current configuration of its society, as well as in the history of image production.