Adriana Varejão on her most shocking painting: ‘It’s important to see this violence’

Adriana Varejão’s studio, in the lush, fancy environs of Rio de Janeiro’s Jardim Botânico neighbourhood, is built around a courtyard. The main space for making art is a two-storey block of the tropical modernist style. Facing it is the artist’s former house, now offices and a yoga studio her team uses after a laborious day making the large-scale “cracked surface” paintings Varejão has become known for. As I arrive, on the studio side, the artist — dressed casually in a purple vest and baggy shorts — is folding open a vast cantilenliaever door, opening up the entire upper floor to the midday sun.

This spring, Varejão has solo exhibitions at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York — only the second contemporary artist to do so — and Gagosian in Athens, making a new series of “plates” for both, her vast highly decorated concave wall works.

Meanwhile, she is curating an exhibition of her older work alongside that of the late Paula Rego at the Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian in Lisbon. It is this that is causing the most stress. “It is nice just to be making new work, because being a curator involves so much organisation: finding out where all the old works are, getting hold of the Paula Regos,” she says, gently pushing away Lua, her dog, a nine-year-old former beach stray.