Adriana Varejío draws on the fields of art history, anthropology, the language of the body, and the legacy of cultural exchange in her native country of Brazil. Much of Varejío’s work references French and Portuguese baroque art, exploring its relationship to the social and political dynamics of colonialization. Her work Meat à la Taunay (1997), for instance, is based on a painting by the French artist Nicolas-Antoine Taunay, who traveled to Brazil in the seventeenth century to document the splendor of the New World. European artists like Taunay offered an outsider vision of Brazil that helped to form the ways in which the Americas were envisioned abroad. Through the gesture of gouging apart a copy of a Taunay landscape, Varejío re-evaluates the misrepresentation of indigenous life by the colonizers.

One of Varejío’s particular interests has been in historical porcela