LOS ANGELES, CA.- Gagosian is presenting “Interiors,” an exhibition by Adriana Varej鉶, one of Brazil’s most renowned contemporary artists. A collateral project of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, this is Varej鉶’s first-ever West Coast exhibition and includes important loans from Brazil and Europe in a selected survey from the last twenty years.

Embodying the fraught pluralism of Brazilian identity and the diverse implications of social, cultural, and aesthetic exchange, Varej鉶’s unprecedented artistic forms—which encompass painting, sculpture, and video installation—reach across time and place, exposing the multivalent nature of history, memory, and cultural representation.

In “Interiors,” the spatial drama of the Baroque assumes many forms: from the guise of Minimalism’s cool geometries; to the uncertainty that disrupts the seamless logic of the painted surface; to the ruins of Euclidean architecture, thick with flesh, blood, and fat. In the Sauna paintings, Varej鉶 invents chambers tiled in intricately painted monochromatic gradations, recalling the perspectival grids underlying Renaissance masterpieces, as well as the geometries of the modern digital realm. In O iluminado [The Shining] (2009), yellow vibrates across the entire color spectrum, its bright energy underscored by seemingly infinite variations in hue. The abstracted spaces depicted in these paintings are at once familiar and strange, recalling bathhouses, swimming pools, slaughterhouses, and hospitals—places of routine and leisure, life and death. Light beams from an undetectable source; with no visible exits, the environments appear as psychologically charged labyrinths, seductive thresholds for the viewer's gaze. In the intimately scaled singular painting, The Guest (2004), blood pools on white tiles, a forensic trace of the body and its vulnerability.

Parede com incis骵s � la Fontana [Wall with Incisions in the Style of Fontana] (2000) depicts a light blue tiled wall slashed vertically, like the canvases of Lucio Fontana. However, instead of revealing empty voids, Varej鉶’s canvas bleeds from its deep gashes, creating an equivalence with the human body by drawing on the Baroque tradition of painting livid flesh. For Varej鉶, flesh is a symbolic tool, infusing the ordinary with an inherent eroticism to stir both attraction and repulsion. It sits beneath and between the tiled surfaces of her ru韓as de charque (jerked beef ruins), wall and floor sculptures whose titles refer to real locations in Portugal, Brazil, and Italy. In Rome Meat Ruin (2016), sections of pale yellow, blue, and white tiles meet along a straight, towering corner fragment, only to erupt into masses of deep red viscera. And in A鏾ugue Song (2000), chunks of meat are strung across the canvas, entirely coated in a crackled white monochrome effect inspired by the morphologies of Song dynasty glazed ceramics.

These surface fractures become deeper, verging on geological, in Varej鉶’s Azulej鉶 (“big tile”) paintings, made by applying a thick layer of viscous plaster to canvas and allowing it to dry naturally over a long period of time. Ongoing since the first iteration in 1988, the paintings are based on the traditional square, glazed terracotta tiles (azulejos) that have been the most widely used form of decoration in Portuguese national art since the Middle Ages. Absorbing influences from Moorish artisans, Italian Renaissance painting, Chinese porcelain, and Dutch d閏or, the azulejo is a metaphor for the mixing of cultures, whether by force or by desire. Previously, Varej鉶 has arranged her paintings in vast grids, echoing the traditional use of the azulejo in architecture, but with visible disruptions to the narrative schemes; or created large individual works whose images—whether a geometric pattern, a sinuous flourish, or a figurative motif—move towards abstraction. The most recent monochromes—each a variation of porcelain “white”—with their open cracked surfaces, are as seismic as they are sublime.

During Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Transbarroco, Varej鉶’s only multi-channel video installation to date, will also be on view for the first time in the U.S., following recent presentations in Brazil, Portugal, and Italy. This compelling work, shot on location in Brazil, captures in sweeping takes specific details of noted Baroque church interiors that relate the story of cultural exchange and assimilation, underscored by an ambient sound collage intercut with recitations of key writings on Brazilian identity.

Adriana Varej鉶 was born in 1964 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where she lives and works. Collections include Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Inhotim Centro de Arte Contempor鈔ea, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna de S鉶 Paulo; Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro; Cole玢o Gilberto Chateaubriand, Rio de Janeiro; Tate Modern, London; Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Fundaci髇 “la Caixa,” Barcelona; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Hara Museum, Tokyo. Major institutional exhibitions include “Azulej鮡s,” Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro and Bras韑ia, Brazil (2001); “Chambre d’閏hos / C鈓ara de ecos,” Fondation Cartier pour l碼rt Contemporain, Paris (2005, traveled to Centro Cultural de Bel閙, Lisbon; and DA2, Salamanca, Spain); Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2007); “Adriana Varej鉶 - Hist髍ias 鄐 Margens,” Museu de Arte Moderna de S鉶 Paulo, Brazil (2012, traveled to Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), Argentina in 2013); “Adriana Varej鉶,” The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2014); and “Adriana Varej鉶: Kindred Spirits,” Dallas Contemporary (2015). She participated in the Bienal de S鉶 Paulo (1994, 1998); the 12th Biennale of Sydney (2000); the International Biennial Exhibition, SITE Santa Fe (2004); Liverpool Biennial (1999, 2006); Bucharest Biennale (2008); Istanbul Biennial (2011); “30x Bienal,” Funda玢o Bienal de S鉶 Paulo (2013); Bienal do Mercosul, Brazil (1997, 2005, 2015); and the first Bienal de Arte Contempor鈔ea de Coimbra, Portugal (2015).

In 2008, a permanent pavilion dedicated to Varej鉶’s art was inaugurated at Inhotim Centro de Arte Contempor鈔ea, Brumadinho, Minas Gerais, Brazil. In 2016, she was commissioned to produce a temporary mural based on her epic work Celacanto provoca maremoto to cover the entire facade of the Centro Aqu醫ico for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro; and the video installation Transbarroco was presented at the French Academy of Rome - Villa Medici to coincide with her exhibition at Gagosian Rome.