Lot 48: Adriana Varejão (b. 1964) , Meat à la Taunay

oil on canvas with porcelain plates signed, titled and dated 1997 on the reverse of the canvas Canvas: 29 1/8 by 25 1/4 by 2 in. (74 by 64 by 5 cm) Plates diameter (each): 9 7/8 in. (25 cm) Overall: 67 by 76 in. (170.2 by 193.1 cm)

San Diego, Museum of Contemporary Art; Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; San Francisco, Museum of Modern Art; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario; Miami, Miami Art Museum; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Ultra Baroque: Aspects of Post Latin American Art , September 24, 2000-January 5, 2003, pp. 104-106, illustrated in color

Galería Camargo Vilaça, São Paulo
Private Collection, Mexico City

Adriana Varejão?s paintings literally explode from their pictorial plane and extend beyond the confines of their frames invading the three dimensional space around them. In the process Varejão redefines the boundaries of painting, sculpture, and installation while challenging more traditional norms of aesthetics and beauty. Her exuberant and mutilated works in many ways function as stand-ins or metaphors for the corporeal and suggests a profound examination of the historical and cultural impact of the Baroque in Brazil. References to Portuguese tile work, Dutch porcelains, European travel paintings, colonial art, and the rituals of Catholicism reveal the artist?s ongoing interest in exploring the violence of colonialism and its legacy of expansionism and exchange. Likewise Varejão?s ravaged surfaces may be seen within the context of postmodernism and the desire to reevaluate the very nature and idea of painting. Meat à la Taunay synthesizes many of the artist?s concerns and is particularly relevant to her ongoing exploration of the social and political dynamics of colonial expansionism. In this work, Varejão appropriates a facsimile of a landscape painting by the French nineteenth-century academic painter Nicolas-Antoine Taunay (1755-1830). A member of the French artistic mission to Brazil, Taunay arrived in Brazil in 1816 and founded the Academy of Fine Arts in Rio de Janeiro. Like other European travel painters, Taunay?s renderings of the flora, fauna, and people of Brazil constructs the typical exotic narrative of the New World filtered through the gaze of an outsider and inevitably informing the ways in which Europeans envisioned the Americas as well as the manner in which local populations conceived of themselves. In a bold gesture of defiance and critique towards this history of misappropriation and misrepresentation of native cultures, Varejão extracts chunks of fragments from Taunay?s mock painting and serves it up to the viewer on several porcelain plates displayed around the canvas. The plates are similar to those manufactured by the West India Company - a colonial Dutch company that exported its wares throughout a global network of ports including Asia, Europe, and the Americas. Through its extensive trade routes, the company was instrumental in introducing the style of chinoiserie in Europe and later in the Americas where it had a tremendous impact on the colonial decorative arts, particularly in countries like Brazil which served as a major hub of cultural encounter and exchange in this international circuit.