Lehmann Maupin Gallery - 540 West 26 Street 540 West 26 Street New York City, NY 10001 USA (city map) Send E-mail tel +1 212 - 255 29 23 www.lehmannmaupin.com

The visually arresting work of Adriana Varejão draws on her heritage as an artist living and working in Brazil. Incorporating both popular and art historical images in her painting, and appropriating potent remnants of Brazil's colonial past, she constructs sculptural paintings that often take the fragmented or eviscerated human body as their subject. Extremely tactile and often saturated in blood-red hues, Varejão's highly visceral work recalls the pain and pleasure that accompanies both colonialism and the creative process. Her work defies narrow classification. Although her work is of a culture, it reaches beyond geographical boundaries.

In her new paintings, Varejão uses the sea as a point of departure. Continually reexamining and re presenting Brazil's cultural history, Varejão views the sea as the common link between countries such as Portugal, China and India- all countries sharing in Brazil's development. The ocean-inspired images in the show are comprised of layers of stretched canvas hung as one. The result is an installation that uses multiple canvases and the wall as if they are a continuous plane. The image of the sea begins to float. In conjunction, Varejão will show several self-portraits that also question space and identity.

Born in 1964, Adriana has been included in the São Paolo Biennial 1998, the Johannesburg Biennial 1995, and was included in the first Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, which opened in September 1999. In addition, she has exhibited internationally at Galeria Carmargo Vilaça in São Paolo, Gislaine Huseenot in Paris, and Soledad Lorenzo in Madrid.