Lehmann Maupin is pleased to present Kindred Spirits, renowned Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery. Varejão will include works from her two most recent series: Kindred Spirits, 29 portraits of the artist donning the face painting and body ornamentation of Native American tribes intermixed with markings derived from artworks by Minimalist and contemporary American artists, and the Mimbres paintings, which reference the visual culture of the Mimbres people who inhabited the American Southwest in the 11th century. Together these bodies of work elaborate on Varejão’s longstanding interest in colonialism’s effect on the aesthetics of identity.

Regarded as one of Brazil’s most accomplished contemporary artists, Varejão often references cultural and historic research through an intense investigation into anthropology, colonial trade, demography, and racial identity. She is especially influenced by theories of mestizaje (a term for the mixing of ancestries) and cultural anthropophagy—as proposed by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade, who urged artists to “cannibalize,” rather than reject, cultural components of their country’s colonizers. The idea of empowering oppressed peoples through the assimilation of outside influences is reinforced through Varejão’s mixture of global artistic mediums and styles. Her approach has resulted in a diverse body of work that can be both humorous and grotesque in its assessment of humankind’s history of coexistence.