Adriana Varejão’s Histórias Moldadas at the Gagosian blurs the lines between painting and sculpture

Drawing on the theatricality of the Baroque—with its flair for paradox, excess, and emotional tension—Varejão’s work blurs the lines between painting and sculpture. Her surfaces split and swell, her forms ripple with life. These are not just paintings; they are provocations—sculptural canvases that challenge artistic norms and reframe the histories we think we know.

At the heart of her practice is a fascination with craquelure, the web-like cracking seen in ancient ceramics. Channeling the delicate porcelain of China’s Song dynasty, Varejão mixes plaster by hand, spreads it over canvas, and lets it dry naturally—surrendering to the unpredictable choreography of time and chemistry. The result is a surface rich with narrative: fractured, weathered, alive. It speaks of ruins, dry earth, and forgotten worlds.

Her Tile series, ongoing since 1988, captures the tangible beauty of ceramic—its luster, its weight, its fragility. In these works, Chinese porcelain meets Portuguese azulejos, and Islamic patterns dance with motifs from the Italian Renaissance. These painted “tiles” tell a global story, linking colonial Brazil to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia in one intricate, crackled skin.

On the gallery’s ground floor, two radiant rooms glow with the warmth of terracotta. In one, earthy clay tones are layered with delicate white forms inspired by Maragogipinho pottery from Bahia, Brazil. The motifs—both wild and orderly, animal-like and human—evoke our deep bond with the land.

Next door, her language of fissures transforms again—this time through plaster sculptures shaped by Brazilian craft and ancient Greek myth. One standout piece appears as a bull-shaped vessel adorned with a voluptuous female figure—a nod to the sensual forms of Maria Martins, but also to the legend of Zeus and Europa. Colored in rich amber and deep black, it bridges the ancient and the contemporary with effortless grace.

Upstairs, a tranquil suite of monochrome paintings pays homage to Chinese imperial porcelain, particularly the sublime celadon glaze known as Qing Ci. Described in a Song dynasty poem as “the color of becoming,” this ethereal green-blue hue evokes skies after rain and the quiet transformation of nature.

“The cracks are shaped by nature’s intelligence. The same hand that draws the cracks draws tree branches, roots, lightning bolts, the veins in leaves, the veins in our body. The painting cracks to find this balance.”
— Adriana Varejão

The journey concludes in a gallery bathed in oceanic blue and white. These works reference Turkish Iznik ceramics—fragments of maritime culture from the Ottoman Empire. Cracks shimmer like wave patterns. Eyes, tentacles, and sea creatures swirl across the surface, as if stirred by the currents of memory and myth.

This Athens exhibition runs in parallel with two other major Varejão showcases:
Adriana Varejão: Don’t Forget, We Come From the Tropics, at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York (through June 22), and
Paula Rego e Adriana Varejão: Entre os vossos dentes, at Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon (through September 22).